The Speculative Short Stories of Barbara Paul, page 6
Kara Pope exulted; now she had enough. She sent commands; forty blocks away Chickie tossed her long blond hair and smiled. “That is satisfactory.”
The elegant man was growing skeptical again. “The Olafsson 940 security vault has never been breached. Are you sure you can do it?”
“It’s been breached once. Carlotta Cosmetics has one—which they think is still guarding their skin-dyeing formula while they wait for FDA approval.”
“They think?”
“They don’t know the formula’s gone. I left a substitute.”
He smiled. “Excellent.” Then he looked amused. “Carlotta doesn’t have an arrangement with the FDA?”
Chickie shrugged, as if not interested. But Kara Pope was interested. The FDA could be bought? She made a note.
“Half your fee will be deposited to your account before you leave the building,” the man said. “You’ll get the other half when I have the microchip in my hand.”
“Also satisfactory, Mr. Tyrell.”
He did a good job of hiding his surprise. “So. You know who I am.”
“Of course. I never work blind.” Chickie turned and started to walk away, in a casual lope that looked especially interesting from the rear.
Tyrell called after her, “Perhaps when all this is finished. . .?”
She threw him a look back over her shoulder. “Perhaps.” She left the warehouse, never once having glimpsed the four henchmen hiding in the shadows.
Kara Pope breathed a sigh of relief. She had what she needed and Chickie had got out safely. Kara downloaded the scene in the warehouse from her simulacrum’s memory, then put her in a cab and sent her home.
But before she disconnected the wires running into the base of her skull, Kara logged onto the newsnet and put her story up for bid: Handley Tyrell, CEO of KRJ Systems, Inc., caught in the act of hiring industrial spy to steal from Hightower Electronics. The bidding was vigorous, the story ultimately going to UP/AP Combine. Kara signaled acceptance and duped the story to potential victim Hightower, as required by law.
She shut down her system and unplugged with a feeling of satisfaction. A good night’s work.
Kara Pope owned two state-of-the-art simulacra, the best bioengineering available. Only a half dozen of the topline models existed, each one custom-made; the other four belonged to rich men too old and frail to leave their homes. Kara decided to give Chickie a rest and the following day activated Jocko. She logged him on to the public records net and set him to looking for pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies that always seemed to get quick FDA approval for new products.
Kara had bought separate condos for her two supercyborgs; it had proved easier than she’d imagined to maintain the fiction that Chickie and Jocko were human beings, living normal human-being-type lives. Guaranteed undetectable by any known scanning system, the manufacturer had said proudly. That was only temporary, unfortunately; sooner or later somebody would come up with a way to distinguish the sims from the reals. Then the sim-makers would come out with a new generation of Chickies and Jockos to beat that scanning system; and if Kara didn’t have enough in her account to cover the new models, she’d be out of work. Newsgathering had become too dangerous to undertake in person.
While Jocko searched for companies that might have bribed some FDA official or other, Kara checked her credit account. UP/AP Combine had paid up quickly as they always did godblessem. Kara made big money, but she had big expenses.
The constantly running news channel on the big screen caught her attention: there was her story, as seen through Chickie’s recording eyes. No question, Handley Tyrell was guilty of attempted industrial theft; he’d already been picked up by Hightower Electronics’ private police force and turned over to the civil authorities.
Then a live telecast caught Tyrell right after he’d made bail. Even in these circumstances he still managed to look cool and elegant, peering down his elevated nose at the gatherers yelling questions at him. “It was entrapment,” he said in an attention-commanding voice, “entrapment pure and simple. A woman pretending to be a security expert set me up. The fact that there were pictures means that at least one of her eyes was a camera. And that means either police or a newsgatherer.”
“Do you know which?” someone asked.
“Not yet. But I have a line on her. This story isn’t finished yet.”
A sudden chill. Kara thought back to last night: had she had Chickie change cabs or do anything at all to make sure she wasn’t followed? No. She hadn’t. Appalled at her own carelessness, Kara plugged in and got to work.
Across town, Chickie came to life. She assembled the equipment necessary for some instant cosmetic surgery and sat down before a mirror. One last time Kara ran Chickie’s hand through her long blond hair. Then Chickie opened a thermosealed aluminum case and took out a new head.
Kara/Chickie worked quickly. The new head had altogether dissimilar features and short, curly black hair. The voice was different, and, more importantly, so were the eyes; no retinal scan would identify this Chickie as the one who set up Handley Tyrell. The new head in place, Chickie the Brunette carefully applied a layer of false skin to her neck; it would take about an hour to grow in place.
The job done, Chickie stored the old head and the rest of the equipment in a hidden vault Kara had had installed—an Olafsson 940, as a matter of fact. Chickie activated the vault’s security system, and Kara at last relaxed. Tyrell didn’t know it, but he’d been right last night; the 940 had never been breached.
Her investment protected, Kara took a moment to examine her remodeled simulacrum more carefully. The new Chickie was truly beautiful, with a saucy look to her that Kara liked; she was sorely tempted to take the sim out for a little fun and games. Both Chickie and Jocko were what the manufacturer called stimulus-responsive; from the safety of her home Kara could taste what they tasted, smell what they smelled, feel what they felt. And the sims could feel everything. The best love affairs of Kara’s life had been the ones where she’d used Chickie as her surrogate. The men never knew, and Kara couldn’t think of a better way to practice safe sex.
Once Kara found herself strongly attracted to a man Chickie had recently met. His name was Austin, and he was beautiful. A rather worldly man with a ready laugh and the sense to know how to listen when Kara wanted to talk, Austin had been pure delight. But when he and Chickie eventually ended up in bed, Kara got suspicious; something about his skin, the texture of his musculature—they didn’t feel quite right. She ran an internal scan and learned that Austin, beautiful Austin, was also a simulacrum. One of the earlier models; still quite good, but not adequately shielded against Chickie’s advanced scanning system. So Austin was as phony as Chickie; someone else was doing the same thing with his sim that Kara was doing with hers. She’d laughed out loud at the idea of making whoopee with some stranger somewhere in the city, neither of them knowing what the other looked like. One time she’d even used Jocko for the same purpose, curious to know what it was like for a man. She’d quickly returned to Chickie.
But fun and games could wait; Kara sent Chickie to bed and checked in on Jocko, who’d compiled a list of companies that had gotten suspiciously fast FDA approval of their products. Jocko picked out a couple dozen at random, identified the FDA officials whose signatures had appeared on the approvals, and ran credit checks on them. Seventeen had larger balances than their salaries alone would account for. Six of those had no investments to explain the extra income.
Kara had a choice. She could send Jocko in as a blackmailer or an IRS investigator. Better still: as an accountant working within the FDA, hinting that someone had been diddling with departmental funds, and where did this extra moolah in your account come from, Mr. X? Even so, no one was going to come right out and admit to taking kickbacks; Jocko would have to play it by ear.
But he’d need credentials. Kara sent a coded message to her contact, a man whose true identity she’d never been able to learn. For some reason he used the codename CreamAss; but whoever he was, he was always able to come up with whatever forged credentials she needed. CreamAss charged an arm and a leg, but no one ever challenged the Employer I.D. or the net data or anything else he fabricated. And come income tax time, Kara had no qualms about putting down his fee as a legitimate business expense.
Six hours later, the new credentials were ready. Since they were for Jocko, Chickie would pick them up—a little extra precaution Kara always took: obscure the trail as much as possible. Kara had stopped making pick-ups herself three years ago, when two of her fellow gatherers were set upon and beaten in a similar circumstance. Chickie and Jocko would meet at a restaurant some distance from the pick-up site. Jocko left, looking stiff-backed and a bit stern—exactly like a disapproving accountant—and Kara activated Chickie.
Or tried to. For the very first time, Chickie failed to respond.
Puzzled, Kara ran systems checks on both her home equipment and on Chickie herself. Nothing was wrong at Kara’s end, but from Chickie’s there was no response at all. Nothing. That didn’t make sense; there should be at least an error message. Irritated and a bit uneasy, Kara switched back to Jocko.
A few blocks away, Jocko pressed the speaker button in the back of the cab. “I’ve changed my mind. Take me to 1074 Glendover Street.”
He checked to make sure he had the keycard to Chickie’s place with him. When the cab stopped, he paid the fare and climbed the one flight of stairs to his sister sim’s condo. . .where he saw he wouldn’t need the keycard. The door was slid open a few inches.
Still not suspecting anything, Jocko pushed the door all the way open and called out, “Chickie?” He headed straight for the bedroom, where Kara had left her. And that’s where he found her, lying in bed.
With a laser-burn hole in her head. And another in her chest. Jocko bent over the bed for a closer look. The pseudoflesh had cauterized, but the real destruction was inside. All that expensive bioengineering, irreparably damaged. Chickie had shut down completely. Completely and permanently.
“Hold it right there!” a loud voice rang out. “Put your hands out to the side and turn slowly. Slowly!”
Jocko straightened up and held his hands away from his body. Slowly he turned to see three black-helmeted figures in body armor pointing needle guns at him.
“You’re under arrest,” one of the helmets said. “The charge is murder.”
Kara was so shocked that her system’s automatics had to cut in. Chickie “murdered” and Jocko accused of the deed?
Kara watched unbelieving through Jocko’s recording eyes as her only remaining sim was taken in and charged with homicide, levels one and/or two. This couldn’t be happening. She was going to lose both her sims?
Then common sense returned. That’s what simulacra were for, weren’t they? To take the heat. That could have been Kara Pope herself lying in that bed; her insurance policy had paid off. Kara told herself to count her blessings.
As to losing Jocko—that wouldn’t happen. Chickie might be shielded against every known scanning system, but she’d yield up her secrets to the autopsy surgeon’s laser. Since the wrecking of a simulacrum wasn’t murder, Jocko would eventually be released; it was just a matter of time. And in the interval, Kara could get a story out of it: what it’s like to be falsely accused of a crime, etc.—feature stuff, always good for weekend newscasts.
Jocko was taken to an interrogation room where two cops who didn’t introduce themselves were waiting to question him. Full name first, Jocko Watchman. (Kara had thought Watchman an appropriate name for a newsgatherer’s sim; Chickie’s last name was Shield.) Address, occupation, ID, etc., all accounted for.
One of the cops said, “All right, Watchman, who was she? Who’s the dead girl?”
“I have no idea,” Jocko said.
“We know she’s not the woman who lived there—the neighbors told us that. Why’d you kill her?”
“I didn’t kill her. I came looking for Chickie—”
“Chickie Shield?” the other cop interrupted, reading from a computer screen.
“That’s right. We were supposed to meet for lunch, but she didn’t show. I tried calling her but got no answer, so I went to see if anything was wrong. I’d just found that other woman when the three troopers burst in on me. What were they doing there?”
“Neighbor saw the door open and thought the place was being burglarized,” the first cop said. “So you never saw the dead woman before. You expect us to believe that?”
“Yes,” Jocko said evenly. “I expect you to believe that.”
“Where’s Chickie Shield?”
“I wish I knew. I’m worried about her.”
“Yeah, sure you are. Maybe you killed her, and this other woman saw you do it.”
Kara cut into the newsnet and offered a story for sale: Unidentified corpse found in missing woman’s apartment.
The cops kept on haranguing Jocko, but quick body scans suggested they believed his story. Easy to guess why: he’d had no weapon on him. But there was no other suspect, so the grilling went on a bit longer before Jocko was finally locked into a holding cell. Kara put him on automatic so she could think.
Handley Tyrell you lousy son of a bitch—you killed my beautiful simulacrum!
Even if she could prove he’d done it, Tyrell would no more stand trial for murder than Jocko would. She could get him for destruction of property; but to do that, Kara would have to come forward and identify herself as the sim’s owner. . .thereby targeting herself as the next object of Tyrellian ire. No, she’d have to get him some other way.
Obviously, Tyrell had not done the deed himself; he would have known the brunette sleeping in Chickie’s bed was not the one who set him up. He would have thought she wasn’t the one. Kara remembered the four figures hidden in the warehouse shadows during her talk with Tyrell; but they too knew what Chickie looked like. They had to be private police employed by Tyrell’s company, KRJ Systems; one or more had followed Chickie home and passed on her address to Tyrell. But they wouldn’t have killed the “wrong” woman, unless KRJ had an especially bloodthirsty constabulary in its employ. More likely, KRJ didn’t know anything about the murder.
So Tyrell had had to go outside the company to find his hit man; that suggested his authority within KRJ was not absolute. But he’d found his man, handed him the address, and said kill the woman who lives there. Yes, that’s the way it would have happened. And once Kara’s story appeared on the news, he’d realize the mistake his hitter had made.
Which meant that Tyrell would think Chickie was still alive.
There had to be a way she could use that. Chickie’s head was still locked up in the hidden Olafsson 940; the police had been scouring the place for clues, not sounding the walls for concealed rooms. But the police would have sealed the scene of the crime. . .
Message interrupt. From CreamAss: since she failed to pick up the credentials she’d commissioned, the price had just doubled.
Shit.
Kara wondered how long before the police autopsy report would kick Jocko loose. She wondered where Tyrell was right now. She wondered how long CreamAss would wait before cutting her off entirely.
She could see no way around it. She was going to have to go out herself.
The streets were always changing—distending, decaying, putting on new coats of paint. Having face lifts, or not bothering. Growing people, Kara sometimes thought, right from the cracks in the sidewalks. And such strange people they were, somehow menacing just in the way they looked at you. The man CreamAss had sent with Jocko’s new credentials wore a diamond stud in one nostril; he had his greasy hair pulled back in a pony tail, and he was dressed in a fashion Kara was sure had not been invented yet. He hinted strongly for a tip; when she refused, he called her a name. Kara grabbed the credentials and fled.
The tape the police had used to seal off the door to Chickie’s place had wires running through it; an alarm would sound in the nearest station if the seal was tampered with in any way. Kara checked her watch. Then she broke the seal, headed straight for the Olafsson 940, picked up the aluminum case containing Chickie’s head, and left. She was down on the street in under a minute.
Kara took refuge in a restaurant across the street, curious to see how long it would take the police to get there. She took a swallow of coffee and chewed on a bagel, then turned on her table vid. The news showed what was left of a house in New Jersey after it had been bombed; the entire family had died in the explosion. The owner had been a newsgatherer.
Kara yielded to a moment of despair. We don’t deserve this! Why do they hate us so?
The bleating sound of an approaching police van brought her out of her funk. Kara checked her watch. It had taken the overworked, underpaid, understaffed civil police twenty-two minutes and fourteen seconds to answer the alarm. A company-employed private police force would have had people there within seconds.
Kara left the restaurant; she had one more stop to make before she could go home. A cab took her to KRJ systems, where she waited until she saw Tyrell leave the building. Then she went in and asked for the Personnel Director. Kara applied for a programming position under the name Chickie Shield, using some old credentials CreamAss had provided; it didn’t matter if they stood up or not. When asked for a personal reference, Kara gave the name Handley Tyrell. The Personnel Director said she’d check with Mr. Tyrell and get back to her. Kara said that would be fine.
Then she went home.
Jocko was out; the police told him goodbye the minute they learned the dead woman was a simulacrum. Kara had beat the other gatherers with her story to the newsnet.
The timing was perfect. She’d given Tyrell twenty-four hours to stew; Kara wanted him to think Chickie was after him. She plugged in and put her remaining sim to work.
Jocko went shopping. First he bought a curly black wig. Then he bought a laser gun—easier to find than the right kind of wig. Then he went hunting for a second-hand simulacrum, the cheaper the better. He found one, a poorly maintained early model that could perform only the simplest of tasks; it was little more than a robot. And it was an “It”; those first models had been genderless. But It could still walk, and that was all that was required.
