Version 43 Read online

  In consequence, I mentally summarized, I was now

  1) surrounded by a gang of ruthless heavily armed killers, and

  2) confident that all of these gangsters would have been briefed on how to true-kill me.

  To true-kill me, of course, they needed to use explosive hardtip bullets not plasma blasts on my hardmetal frame, and they also needed to shoot the bullets into the centre of my torso, where my cybernetic brain was housed, not into my skull.

  And, most important of all, when I was dead, they needed to rip out my inner core and gouge out the contents and smash them, and then destroy my databird—the backup memory device that would otherwise allow me to save my personality into a new body.

  Grogan’s people would, I posited, know all this. And they were of course skilful warriors, fighting on home turf, with the odds overwhelmingly in their favor—-one cyborg Cop against more than two-score heavily armed gangsters.

  Swiftly—in less than a trillionth of a second—I ran a scenario analysis based upon all the above data, and reached my final conclusion:

  These poor sorry bastards didn’t stand a chance.

  For Zanna

  THE COP

  Version 43

  I was in a cheerful mood. The sky was a rich blue. The twelve moons of Belladonna shone, it seemed to me, like globes on a Christmas tree in the daytime sky. I could smell heliotropes, growing in banks beside the moving walkways, and orchids and lilies and peonies growing in baskets that hovered above the pedestrian boulevard.

  I was one day old. I would, my database warned me, grow more jaded with the passage of time. But for the moment, life felt good.

  It was a short walk from the spaceport to the crime scene. I was in constant subvocal contact with the Sheriff, Gordon Heath, and the crime-scene photos scrolled in front of my eyes as I walked. But the air was fresh, and the heliotropes and the orchids and the lilies and the peonies were fragrant, as were the roses and the summer lilacs and cut grass in the parkland that led off the boulevard. A woman was sunbathing naked on the grass, and I registered her distant beauty, and felt a faint stirring of remembered regret.

  Then I walked on, another five blocks. Most of the citizens were using the moving walkways, twin rivers on either side of the pedestrian thoroughfare. Flybikes and flying cars zoomed above me, rather lower than was prudent or indeed (I checked this on my database) legal. The Belladonnans, I noted, dressed soberly but elegantly. Many of the men had grey or black waistcoats and ornate buckled belts and armoured jackets. The women tended to wear long silver or gold or scarlet dresses and high-heeled boots, apart from the courtesans who wore jewelled gowns.

  “I’m Sheriff Heath.”

  “I’m aware of your identity,” I said. I was now at the crime scene, and I filtered out my olfactory sensations to focus on the case.

  “Pleased to meet you too,” the Sheriff chided, and I registered the hint of irony but decided it would be politic to ignore it.

  The Sheriff and I were standing outside a twelve-storey hotel made of black brick. Police officers had cordoned off the area with holos proclaiming POLICE and MURDER SCENE – KEEP AWAY. The citizens on the moving walkways gawped at the sight, secretly thrilled (or so I posited) at the glimpse of a terror that had passed them by.

  “Sheriff, feel free to call me Luke,” I added, in a belated attempt to build a rapport.

  In fact, “Luke” was not and never had been my name.

  “Sure, I’ll do that. ‘Luke’.”

  This time, there was open scorn in the lawman’s tone, but I chose to ignore that subtextual nuance also.

  Sheriff Heath, I noted, looked shockingly old – too old perhaps for cosmetic rejuve? – though his body was fit and strong. He was bald, heavily wrinkled, with a grey walrus moustache and peering blue eyes. I had been impressed at the diverse range of his bio: soldier, pirate, artist, scientist and bartender. Now, he was Sheriff of the Fourth Canton of Lawless City.

  “Through here.”

  The holograms of the crime scene didn’t do justice to its horror. Blood and human flesh spattered the walls and ceilings. A screaming severed head swam in a pool of blood on the bed. And inside the mouth, which gaped unnaturally large, was a human heart, squeezed and squirted. It was evident that multiple murders had occurred, and that the killings had all been frenzied.

  I switched on my decontam forcefield and hovered back and forth a centimetre above the ground. I used my finger-tweezers to take samples of blood and flesh, and carefully counted and collated the scattered limbs and organs in order to make a tally of the corpses. (Final count: five, of which two were male, three female.) The chaotic dispersal of body parts at this crime scene was far from typical: I found two legs and all five livers in the wardrobe and a pair of hands and six eyes underneath the floor panels in the kitchen, and the entrails of all the corpses were enmeshed and interconnected to form effectively a vast colon. In addition, one set of lungs had fallen under the bed.

  At one point I glanced behind, and was startled to see that the Sheriff was pale and looked nauseous.

  “Murder weapon?” I asked.

  “We found nothing. We don’t know what could have done this.”

  “Plasma beam? Samurai sword?”

  “Look closer.”

  I looked closer. I’d assumed that the heart in the mouth of the severed head on the bed had been inserted by a psychopathic ritual killer. But an eyeball-tomograph told me that the heart was actually occupying the space normally reserved for a tongue, and was organically connected to the throat. I took pinprick microsamples and analysed the DNA, and found that the DNA in the head’s staring eyeballs didn’t match the DNA of the head itself, and neither was a match for the heart. I then performed a dissection of the heart, and found, inside it –

  – an erect penis.

  For the first time in many years, I wished I could desire to vomit.

  “What is this?” I marvelled.

  “Our best guess,” said the Sheriff. “These bodies were quantum teleported, and got jumbled up along the way. That’s why we called you in. A quantum teleport weapon, we ain’t never hearda such a thing. So we reckoned, must be banned technology, your kinda can of worms.”

  “Amongst other things. Do we have any idea who these victims are?”

  “I recognise this one,” the Sheriff said, gesturing at the severed staring head.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s my son,” the Sheriff said, barely a quaver in his voice.

  I processed that fact for a few moments, and decided not to comment on the horrific coincidence.

  “His name?”

  “Alexander. Alexander Heath. We didn’t get on so well. He was a stubborn bastard, just like me.”

  “Enemies?”

  “Just me.”

  “What gang did he work for?”

  “He was clean. He was a doctor at the City Hospital. Two convictions for violence as a boy, but they were gang-related mano a manos, and since then, he’s lived the pure life.”

  “What about you? Do you have enemies?”

  “None. I’m corrupt as hell. No one could fall out with me.”

  I processed this too; it tallied with all my data. I nodded.

  “I’ve identified two men, including your son, and three women. Could they be colleagues?” I asked.

  “Worth checking out.”

  I checked it out, cross-referencing the DNA of the corpses against the City Hospital personnel records.

  “They’re all medics,” I said, a few seconds later. “In addition to your son, the corpses are: Andrei Pavlovsky, Jada Brown, Sara Limer, Fliss Hooper. Know them?”

  “Fliss was my son’s girl. Pretty as hell. He thought I was hitting on her; that was one of our fallings out.”


  “Were you?”

  “In my dreams. She was a looker.”

  “Did you love your son?”

  “Oh yes.”

  I felt an emotion inside myself, and identified it, and marvelled at its richness and its power:

  It was Rage.

  Lawless City had a real name: Bompasso. After John Bompasso, one of the three creators of cute-o, the Quantum Theory of Everything.

  No one ever called it that.

  It was a city built on hills, and riddled with rivers – five of them, intertwining like rats’ tails – and dominated by black-stoned towering buildings decorated with jewelled carvings by master artisans. Many of the buildings teetered precariously on thin pillars, or even floated above the ground. It was forcefield architecture at its most inspired: the marble and the stone were clad over a diagrid of unyielding nothingness.

  I had, my database told me, visited this city three times before. Once I had been ambushed by desperadoes and killed. The second time I had arrested and then executed those desperadoes. And on my last visit, I had successfully smashed the entire crime cartel. Four gang bosses had been killed, eleven more had been brain-fried. A democratic government had been appointed, and incorruptible cyborg judges had been placed in charge of the criminal justice system. And an army of street cops were hired to enforce the rule of law.

  That was a hundred years ago. Now, the gangs were back in charge. The dons were all new immigrants, with souls seared by frequent brain-frying on one of the Home Planets. They were ruthless, hungry, and full of dangerous exhilaration at having survived the fifty-fifty.

  It was a wretched state of affairs, but I didn’t feel even a twinge of despair at the prospect of working on such a planet.

  For I had expunged Despair from my circuits long ago, considering it to be a purposeless and dispiriting emotion. Instead, I felt Excitement at the challenge ahead. I would solve this crime; and when I had solved the crime, I would solve all the other crimes that I might happen to stumble across. I would restore peace and justice to Bompasso.

  Then I would leave, and peace would reign for a while.

  And then, after a slightly longer while, the violence would return. And Bompasso would once again be known as Lawless City.

  “This is your hotel,” said the Sheriff, and I craned my neck.

  “Which room?”

  “Any room. It’s yours. It’s fully staffed.”

  I continued to stare up at the hotel. It was a double bay-fronted mansion decorated with gold-inlaid sgraffito and ruby bosses, set in the ubiquitous black stone. It shimmered like a rainbow that has snared a pot of gold.

  “I don’t need a whole hotel.”

  “It’s yours. You’re our guest.”

  “I don’t even sleep. I just need a socket to plug myself in to at night.”

  “You recharge?”

  “I’m kidding. I don’t recharge. My batteries never run out. I kid, sometimes.”

  “Remember to warn me.”

  “I will, Sheriff.”

  “We’ve given you hologram facilities. You can speak to anyone you like anywhere on the planet.”

  “I don’t like holograms. I prefer to interview suspects in the flesh.”

  “Flesh?”

  “I’m still kidding.”

  “Ho, forgive my hilarity, ho. Did they ever tell you—?”

  “I’m not at liberty to answer personal questions.”

  “So they didn’t, huh.” The Sheriff grinned, knowingly, with a hint of condescension.

  I was used to this kind of treatment from living humans. I had once analysed the reasons for it, and had recorded my conclusion on my database: humans like to think they are better than cyborgs, despite being, in every relevant specification, less efficient, less effective, and inferior.

  “My personality,” I explained gently, “is a template for my consciousness. It really doesn’t matter who used to own it.”

  “I can’t imagine—”

  “What?”

  “Living on in a robot body. Forever.”

  “My personality does not live on. The human I used to be is dead. It’s me now. Just me.”

  “Yeah. The hotel door is set to your codes. Just give it a hard stare, it’ll let you in.”

  “I need to start interviewing.”

  “Who? We have no suspects.”

  “We have a city full of suspects, Sheriff. I want to get to know them all.”

  This was a city of high and low tenements, narrow alleys, cluttered side-streets, and tall, magnificent, needle-like soaring spires. There were no churches in Lawless City, and no religion. But the spires were the homes of the city’s ancien régime, the original Founders. A hundred spires loomed high over the city’s affairs, brushing the soft pink clouds of this small and once-arid planet.

  I hired a flybike to carry me across the city. In the distance, like sentries guarding the horizons, were red mountains and vast savannahs of yellow dust dotted with meadows of vividly green grass.

  I wove a path through the sky-scraping spires and looming tenement blocks of the black-stoned city. And then I landed in the vehicle park of the City Hospital.

  The hospital was the key to it, I had decided.

  All five victims had worked at this hospital: therefore, I theorised, all five victims must have been involved in a medical fraud. The fraud went wrong, the expected profit targets were not met, and the poor dumb fraudsters were eliminated by the evil gang boss who had conceived the whole enterprise. That was my working hypothesis.

  This still left the mystery of how the medics had been killed: I assigned a subroutine to worry away at that.

  My primary consciousness, however, focused on finding the motive, method and opportunity for the underlying fraud, which would then allow me to draw up a list of the most likely suspects for the murders.

  Medical fraud of course meant organ theft or rejuve theft. What else could it be? I was aware that Belladonna had an appallingly inefficient medical system: some citizens waited decades for rejuve therapy or organ and limb replacement. The rich lived for ever on this planet, but the poor had to steal to get money to jump the clinical queue, even in cases of dire medical emergency.

  As a consequence there was, my database informed me, a shockingly high true-death rate on Belladonna. On Earth it was rare for more than ten or eleven people to true-die a year, out of a population of two point three billion. On Belladonna, by contrast, there were more than five hundred thousand true-deaths a year, out of a population of eight hundred and fifty million.

  This created, I concluded, the ideal conditions for a black market in stolen body parts.

  My database reminded me of a case on Calabria where hospital patients suffering minor digestive ailments were sedated, and had their eyes and genitalia removed. The traumatised victims had to wait nearly twenty years before they could receive the intensive rejuve therapy that allowed their missing organs to grow back.

  I strode swiftly out of the vehicle park, entered via the hardglass door into the hospital reception, then moved swiftly past the robot porters. And I marvelled at how patiently the crowds of citizens were waiting to be seen.

  I went through four levels of security until I was admitted to the large and oddly deserted administration office. There I spoke to the deputy hospital manager in charge of admissions, who was named Macawley – just Macawley – in her holo-walled office that offered a dazzling animated array of angry rock stars.

  Macawley looked younger than her actual age which, my database informed me, was twenty-five. She was a genetically engineered wild-looking girl with claws instead of fingernails. She wore a silver bodysuit, tightly fitting, with green flashes on the arms and breasts to match her green eyes. I considered her to be rather eerie. She smiled at me tentatively. After .05 of a second had elapsed, I realised she was afraid of me.

  “Your name is Macawley. You are the DHMICA,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s me,” she said, and the tentative smile
was now just an anxious twitch of the lip.

  “Hello Macawley. I believe that you were born on this planet. Your mother was transported after being convicted on capital charges, she died when you were five, you are estranged from your stepfather, Ron Barclay, who is a drug dealer,” I told her, chattily, attempting to put her at her ease.

  “Yes – how did you – fuck, I know how you knew that! You have a database?”

  “I’m just guessing,” I said, with an attempt at humour. The fear flickered in those green eyes again.

  “It’s a nice planet,” I volunteered.

  “Is it?”

  “I’ve been to many. This is nice. Too much desert, though. There’s one place I’ve been to—”

  I stopped talking. Macawley was virtually spasming with anxiety. “I’m here to enforce the law,” I pointed out. “You have no need to fear me.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “They say you’re a cold killer,” Macawley said, and I stifled an emotion: Scorn.

  “Maybe I am,” I told her softly, and touched her hand with my robot fingers. She didn’t flinch, nor did she shove my hand away.

  “Look at these photographs,” I told her, and with my eyes I projected images of the five dead medics into the air in front of her.

  “I’m looking.”

  “Do you know them?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Answer the question.”

  “Yes I do know them.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I’m not telling you that, unless you tell me why you want to—”

  I interrupted: “This is a murder investigation.”

  She blinked.

  “They’re dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Murdered?”

  “Yes.”

  A strange look came over her face: I identified it as Shock.

  “They—” she said, and cleared her throat. “They all worked here. Three of them were doctors – Dr Alexander Heath, Dr Fliss Hooper, Dr Sara Limer. Jada Brown and Andrei Pavlovsky were nurses.”