Dervish Is Digital Part 13

"That's even more special than I would have imagined." She put Taliaferro's face up on the monitor wall. "You have a record of me hanging around here talking to myself?"

"At least this time I have a record of you," Taliaferro said genially. "I've put in a requisition for better hardware and software."

"By the time you get it, we'll both have retired," Konstantin said.

"Optimist."

"It's all right," she told him. "I have another source in mind. I'm disconnecting for real again. Got to make a phone call, and I don't want to do it from here."

The arms dealer's real name was Ross -- one name, official -- and she was not amused.

Konstantin had to admit to herself that she wouldn't have been, either, if the detective who had arrested her for counterfeiting had called to demand favors while all of her worldly possessions were being inventoried and evaluated for payment of fines. But neither did the woman hang up on her, and that was probably good, Konstantin thought.

"I design -- designed -- weapons," the arms dealer said. Like many people, she had chosen an AR face that had been an idealized version of herself. Over the telephone screen, she was a bit rougher and larger, with a hint of a double chin, short, bristly hair, and smaller, sadder eyes. Still, Konstantin could see the resemblance. "I'm not much for doodling software for its own sake. Besides, I thought you were such a whiz. Canoodling being your metier, or whatever it was you told me. Big code freak, I thinkit was? Crooked cop."

"We've got a lot more lat.i.tude in AR," Konstantin said, "though I'd bet that'll change before the year is out."

"Until then, I'm sure you'll put it to good use," the arms dealer said sourly. "Against dangerous criminals like me."

"Starting over won't be easy under any circ.u.mstances," Konstantin said. "But it can be less hard if someone means well for you, especially if it's someone who arrested you."

"So you said." The arms dealer nodded. "But then you keep saying you can't promise anything, and I don't see why I should try to help you out when there's no guarantee."

"That's exactly what will work in your favor," Konstantin told her. "That you helped me out knowing I couldn't guarantee anything."

"Yeah, I'm sure that the DA will melt under the knowledge that I've actually got this out-of-the-goodness-of-my-heart template. No one would believe, for one moment, that I helped you out in the desperate hope of getting some t.i.t for my tat. After all, it's not like this is some stupid AR set-up scenario, is it."

Konstantin put her elbow on her desk and rested her chin on her fist. "OK. I'll promise you something."

The arms dealer's smile was sour. "Thought so."

"While I'd like to promise that things could get easier for you, the only thing I can actually guarantee is that nothing will get any harder than it has to be. There's still a certain amount of lat.i.tude out here in the real world for things like leniency, and it's better to have a cop owe you a favor rather than vice versa."

The woman's sour expression deepened. "Things can get rougher, too, can't they? As well as easier."

"Well, sometimes things get rougher simply by just staying the same, don't they?" Konstantin said, not unkindly.

Now the arms dealer's face was stony. "I find it hard to believe that someone like you would really like Renaissance festivals."

"The best part about not being in AR," Konstantin said evenly, "is that you don't have to stay in character."

The arms dealer surprised her by bursting into hearty laughter. "Oh, don't you?"

"How many ways do I have to say it?" asked Susannah Ell impatiently. "Dervish is digital. Digital Dervish."

Her new virtual studio was smaller, and there were fewer a.s.sistants buzzing around her. Konstantin could tell they weren't from the same template as her previous set. These looked less finished in some way, lacking a lot of the smaller details -- freckles, slightly uneven skin tones, irregular fingers -- that had made the other ones look true to life. Or truer, anyway.

"If you really believe this," Konstantin said, "I'm surprised that you would deliberately ignore what we told you and open up another studio in AR."

Ell stood back from the dressmaker's dummy she had been pinning cloth to, considered for a moment, and then shook her head. "Wipe it," she said, and the material vanished. "Yeah, some studio."

She gestured vaguely as she went over to Konstantin, who was standing near a table piled high with bolts and remnants. She had been surrept.i.tiously feeling the various materials between her fingers and marveling at how authentic the textures were. "It's a cookie-cutter s.p.a.ce in a cookie-cutter brownstone and I don't like to think what I'm paying for it. I had it made before. Rent-controlled loft downtown, all my a.s.sistants broken in the way I like them. This set -- I don't know how they get away with renting out this paper doll c.r.a.p. But it functions, and that is the acceptable minimum, because the people whocontracted for my summer line don't care what happened to me. They can't care. They can't afford to.

There has to be a line of clothing, or I'm just out. And once you're out in this business, officer, you never get back in. I'd end up tailoring smocks for theme park employees. That's not what I had in mind for my life."

"But if Dervish is, uh, digital," Konstantin said, frowning, "he can just destroy everything again.

Can't he?"

"I'm insured this time," Ell told her. "It's all fractally contained. That's why everything's so cramped. If Dervish blows me up again, I can simply pick up where I left off with the next level of regress. It's not perfect, of course, because you have to go in and dither for any fine detail that gets lost, but it should get me through this season. After that, I hope you will have caught him, or stopped him, or erased him, or--"

"Please." Konstantin put up her hands. "Look. I know that you're an educated person. And I know that you must have a certain amount of perception, so I don't think I'm telling you anything when I say that I just don't believe that Hastings Dervish has transmogrified, or however you want to put it, into a digital..." she floundered briefly. "Ent.i.ty."

Ell stared at her blankly.

"Right?" prompted Konstantin. "You know I don't believe that's what's happened here. And you must also know that I don't really understand how you can believe that."

Ell's blank expression began to harden slowly into one of hostility. "I didn't think this came down to a matter of what you believe."

Konstantin managed not to groan out loud. "What I mean is that the situation you describe is impossible."

"You saw the ruins of my studio. Are you telling me that didn't really happen because it's impossible?"

"No, no, no," Konstantin said quickly. "The destruction of your studio happened, of course it did.

I mean Hastings Dervish cannot possibly have become a -- a program. A digital being."

"What do you want to call it?" Ell asked her, gathering her hair around herself for comfort. Even the hair wasn't as long and thick as before, nor as active. "I'm just an end-user, I don't get intimate with data. But let me ask you this: if you don't believe Dervish is digital, and I don't believe Dervish is digital, what does it mean if Dervish believes it?"

"You should come out of there," Taliaferro told her as she boarded the sub-oceanic bullet train for lowdown Hong Kong.

"I've been in and out so many times already today that I've got serious reality-lag," Konstantin said, handing a coupon to the elfin steward waiting just inside the car. This train was mid-twentieth-century s.p.a.ce Age rather than Jules Verne and there was something melancholy about it.

Perhaps it was the fact that the s.p.a.ce Age future had never materialized, and all the shiny-happy looked a bit naive and pathetic from the perspective of the present, AR notwithstanding. Or maybe, Konstantin thought, she just didn't like shiny-happy and she did like Jules Verne.

"All the more reason to come out," Taliaferro said.

"You sound worried." She settled down in a first-cla.s.s seat and managed not to squirm as it molded itself to accommodate her. No one sat next to her. In AR, no one ever sat next to you in First Cla.s.s unless you asked specifically. But, as in real life, you paid extra for the privilege.

"I am. It's a filthy, thankless job but somebody oughta be. You're heading right back into Dervish country."

"Heard from our friend the arms dealer yet?" Konstantin flicked on the screen in the arm of her seat and began paging through the special catalog offers. Accessories were big again.

"You're putting an awful lot of faith in a total stranger," Taliaferro said. "I really don't understand why you think she can come up with something to shield you from Dervish's tricks."

"The Smith and Wesson was completely undetectable," Konstantin said. "I had to get her to strip off the modifications just to make sure." "That was an inanimate object."

"So is a persona, really. In here, it's all data. Varied configurations and permutations, but there's no real difference. Digital is digital is digital."

"Then you should wait to see what your arms dealer comes up with. If she comes up with anything."

"That's what I'm doing," Konstantin said. "But I'm going to wait in lowdown Hong Kong."

"Why?" Taliaferro sounded appalled. "What if something happens?"

"Then I want it to happen where Goku Mura can see it. Besides," Konstantin added, "what could actually happen?"

"I could lose track of you again."

"I'm in a small room in police headquarters. If things get strange, tell Celestine or DiPietro to pull my plug."

"And what if it looks like you've pulled your own plug?"

"Well, then, send one of the Gold Dust Twins to make sure. In person."

Taliaferro sighed. "You can't be thinking straight."

The feeling of acceleration was slightly too intense to be authentic. Konstantin leaned an elbow on the windowsill and watched the ocean go by. The simulated ocean. "What I'm not doing," she said, resting her head on her hand, "is treating this like a real situation. I won't. I refuse. All of them -- Ell, Darwin, Goku Mura, even Hastings Dervish -- they're behaving as if we've all agreed n.o.body violates the kayfabe. All we actually need to do is unplug everyone, cut off a few AR privileges for a while. I'm not playing along any more."

"What Ell told you about Dervish has nothing to do with kayfabe. She doesn't think of this as a scenario."

"I know. She's obviously lost touch with reality, her and Dervish both. They're doing a little pas de deux in the land of the lost. They need a snootful of anti-psychotic drugs and a year of intensive stability therapy, not me."

Taliaferro's chuckle had no humor in it. "If anyone else overheard that, the department would be open to a lawsuit."

A shark the size of a small boat flew along beside her window, occasionally rolling to one side to show her its slash of mouth. This was a ride you could take for real between the Indian subcontinent and Australia, and presumably the shark had been lifted from actual footage on one of those real rides, though it looked as if someone had smoothed out its appearance in the toaster before turning it loose in AR.

Konstantin wondered idly if the enhanced AR experience made the real thing look a bit shabby. Real life: low-rent and the lines are longer.

"Maybe," she said after a bit, "but right now, I don't get the feeling anyone's going to do anything more elaborate than twitch some nerves in a hotsuit."

Sitting through twenty minutes of commercials was considered, by the average AR end-user, a small price to pay for forty extra minutes at no charge. Konstantin used the time to walk from one end of the train to the other and back again, looking at her fellow travelers. None showed much interest in her; they were mostly couples. Of those, however, over half were paired with an AI rather than another person. Computer dating was back. Konstantin wasn't sure what to make of it. Were there really that many people who couldn't find a partner? Or just that many who couldn't find a partner to pretend to take a sub-oceanic bullet train to lowdown Hong Kong?

Or was the precious kayfabe, that all-important consensual reality, easier to preserve when you worked it with an AI who never got bored or upset or otherwise behaved in an unpredictable manner?

Konstantin had a sudden vision of walking into the casino to find that everyone in it was an AI.

Then she laughed at herself. As if the job would ever get that easy.

Celestine buzzed her as soon as she was through the entry channel and out in the square in front of the train station. "Your friendly arms dealer wants to have a sit-down with you," she said. "In there, of course. I'm bringing her through."

"No," Konstantin said firmly. "Wait. I'll come out--"

"Too late, we're already in and on the way."

Konstantin groaned. "Do you have a place where we can meet?" She paused in front of a noodle and seafood bar, where tourists jockeyed for elbow room with a full spectrum of Oriental customers.

You could tell who was real and who wasn't by who was eating. The real people were openly leering at the plates, the busy chopsticks, the mouths in motion. They looked as if they were watching p.o.r.n. Maybe they were. Food p.o.r.n. Maybe in AR, p.o.r.n had different parameters: any natural act that, in AR, becomes impossible and therefore unnatural.

"There's a British Empire nostalgia joint just off the square where you are right now," Celestine told her. "n.o.body of any consequence ever goes there, but the ambience is unreal."

"Is that so?" Konstantin said, wondering if Celestine ever listened to herself.

"Well, I don't actually know first hand. This is just what your friendly arms dealer says. You can practically smell the Boodles gin."

Konstantin smiled to herself. Every so often, it was uplifting to be reminded that smell-o-vision was the one thing they'd been spared thus far.

The plaque embedded in the gla.s.s-topped table where Konstantin sat waiting for Celestine and the arms dealer a.s.sured her that all the rattan in the place had been hand-rendered, hand-corrected, and hand-colored by people who were authorities on period furniture. There was almost nothing but rattan in the place; she wondered how many people had gone mad doing the detail work.

Or maybe if she'd cared to look more closely, she'd have found that there was actually just a relatively small area of original, painstakingly hand-rendered, hand-corrected, and hand-colored weave, which had then been exploded fractally and variegated randomly via software. Thank G.o.d she didn't have to police claims of authenticity, she thought.

Across the bar, which was probably bigger than any real Hong Kong bar had ever been, she saw the arms dealer stroll through a beaded curtain, followed by Celestine in her cyborg drag. She had replaced her steel arms with what looked like bra.s.s. Each time she moved, little puffs of smoke erupted from various moving parts. No, not smoke, Konstantin realized; steam. As they got closer, she could hear an airy, rather pleasant wheezing and whooshing coming from the gears or hydraulics or whatever they were.

"I see you're admiring my new arms," Celestine said, flexing them as the arms dealer sat down across from Konstantin.

"Not there." Konstantin tapped the chair beside her. "Over here. Back to the wall."

The arms dealer smiled with half her mouth as she changed places. "You think I'll be safer?"

"I just want to know if anyone you know comes in," Konstantin told her, and motioned for Celestine to sit where the arms dealer had been. "Bra.s.s fittings. Very nice."

Celestine made a muscle with her right arm; steam whooshed from her shoulder and elbow.

"What do you call that?" Konstantin asked her.

"Steampunk."

Konstantin managed not to roll her eyes as she turned to the arms dealer. She'd chosen to wear the same appearance she'd had when Konstantin had met with her about the Smith and Wesson. "So what was so important that you felt you had to come and talk to me in here?"

"I can get you all the software you want, for anything you want to use it for," the other woman said, eyeing a waiter who went by carrying a martini easily five times the size of the real thing, sporting a green olive the size of a golf ball. "But, ah, in the words of the prophet, it won't mean a thing 'less you got that swing."

"That's illegal."

The arms dealer was disgusted. "What, you think n.o.body goes in here loaded?"

"I didn't have to dose up to get you," Konstantin reminded her. "If you had, you might have picked up a lot more than me." The waiter pa.s.sed them again, going the other way with an empty martini gla.s.s on his tray. It looked even larger than the full one. "Jeez, you can practically smell the Boodles here. Somebody order me a drink."

Konstantin sniffed. "I don't smell anything. Power of suggestion doesn't work if you don't know what something smells like, I guess."

"You don't know what gin smells like?" The arms dealer frowned at her. "Order me a drink. I just want to handle it and look at it and play with the olive. Martinis smell great, but they taste like paint remover."

Celestine's cyborg-face was unmistakeably expectant. Konstantin nodded at her and she lifted her arm to signal the waiter with a wheeze of steam.

Stubbornly, the arms dealer refused to go on until she had her giant martini in front of her. This olive was even bigger than a golf ball and Konstantin felt her mouth suddenly begin to water. d.a.m.n it, she thought; when had she last thought to break for lunch?

"If you've got someone breaking in on you," the arms dealer said after a bit, "they're boosted.

n.o.body's got the natural speed or reflexes to sort through bits looking for a way in."