Tears in Rain Part 29

Yiannis, my friend? It was the first time in his life that he'd seen the woman. He hesitated momentarily, not really knowing where to seat himself, as the room was decorated in the latest minimalist style, with ethereal furniture that was barely visible. He finally opted for a line of bluish light and sat down on it with some trepidation. The line adapted itself to his body and provided support for his back. The supervisor was sitting in a similar chair behind a semitransparent table that merged with an enormous round screen. The decor must have cost a fortune. The Central Archive, one of the most powerful of the USE inst.i.tutions, was owned by PPK, a huge private corporation, although the Central Planetary State had full voting rights on its board of management. And there was no question the archive was a fantastic business, since all the citizens on Earth had to pay a fee each time they accessed its resources.

"I have read your memorandum and in the first instance, I want to thank you for your interest and professional zeal. Because I'm sure you were motivated by the best of intentions. But you'll understand, in the whole time I've been in this position, no one has resorted to emergency protocol CC/1. I don't know if you're aware that when this protocol is activated, a copy of your message is automatically sent to the state's central administration. And to be honest, we all find that very tiresome. Government officials will now turn up, and they'll carry out an investigation."

"But that's fine, that's perfect. We need the USE security services to investigate the irregularities as a matter of urgency."

The supervisor turned her head to one side like a bird and fixed her eyes on Yiannis. She was a skinny, wiry woman with small, hard eyes that rarely blinked.

"Oh, Yiannis, Yiannis. Either I'm not explaining myself well or you're not understanding what I'm saying. Your memorandum was a mistake. An error. A case of overzealousness, to be precise." She was speaking gently, as if she felt sorry for the archivist, but there was a sharp edge to her voice.

"Overzealousness? But how? Have you actually read my memorandum? And the other doc.u.ments? It's undeniable that someone is manipulating the entries."

"I have read everything, I have studied everything, and my experts have studied everything as well. There's nothing. You're imagining things. There's nothing more than a few small insignificant mistakes here and there. The usual errata."

"But-"

"The usual errata! Your behavior is much more serious than those trivial mistakes. You've removed an article from the editing process, interrupting the flow of information, and what's even worse, you've made an illegal, personal copy of a text that has not as yet been authorized. It's unacceptable behavior."

Yiannis noted that he was blushing. He couldn't avoid feeling that he was a criminal; it seemed unacceptable to him, too. The standard phrases of regret and apology began to form in his mouth.

"According to the General Law Governing Archives, removing an illegal copy can be deemed an act of espionage. You could go to jail for it," continued the woman.

The threat was so excessive and so obvious that Yiannis instantly swallowed the excuses he had been on the verge of offering. He snorted indignantly.

"I doubt that anyone would consider me to be a spy. I informed you instantly of my actions. I merely wished to alert you as soon as possible to the gravity of the situation."

"But what problem are you talking about? You're old, Yiannis, you're tired. You're imagining things. Didn't you say that Professor Ras didn't exist? Look."

The woman touched the computer and a cascade of images inundated the big screen: Lumbre Ras at home in New Delhi; Lumbre Ras at an interplanetary holograph conference; Lumbre Ras receiving his n.o.bel Prize-if that little olive-colored man really was Professor Ras, as the doc.u.mentary entries Yiannis was looking at suggested. He was stunned; this very morning, barely a few hours ago, there had been no one of that name on the Internet. Nothing. Lumbre Ras hadn't existed. And now information about him was inundating the screen. Yiannis felt dizzy for a moment. Could it be true that he had been mistaken, then?

"You see? There is no problem, Yiannis. You are the problem."

No. It wasn't a mistake. It was a conspiracy. Someone had falsified all those images and loaded them into the system in a few short hours. He felt his dizziness growing. He felt he was floating over an abyss.

"If you don't take my report seriously, I'll speak to the management committee," he said weakly.

"You're not going to speak to anyone, Yiannis Liberopoulos. You're fired. And, by the way, we've impounded your main screen."

"What? My computer? You've gone into my house? But how dare you," he stammered.

"Article 7C/7 of the Law Governing Archives-recovery of stolen material. We went with the police. All perfectly legal. And don't bother checking your mobile, because it no longer has the copy you made this morning. We've erased it remotely from your console. So you have nothing. And no job, either. And you can be grateful that we won't be pressing charges. And now, if you don't mind..."

Yiannis got up meekly and left the office and then the building like an automaton, barely aware of where he was going. They had fired him. The archive was his life and they had fired him. And on top of that, they had entered his house and removed his computer. And in addition, something terrible was happening-a coup d'etat against the regional state or maybe the planet. His head was spinning and he was covered in cold sweat. He was so dazed that he didn't notice the car slowly coming toward him along the snow-covered street. A dark vehicle with tinted windows. In fact, he didn't see it until it was right on top of him. Until the car roared and rushed at him like a black cloud. Yiannis shrieked, jumped backward, and twisted his ankle; the car skidded, skated over the ice, and grazed him as it went past-Yiannis saved himself by a matter of inches. The archivist, barely breathing, was struck by a terrifying suspicion. They've tried to kill me, he thought. They want to kill me.

Just then, the vehicle managed to right itself. The tinted window on the driver's side was lowered and a man poked his head out and looked at him, enraged.

"Immmbeciiiiiile!" he yelled as he drove off.

Yiannis stood there, taken aback. And then he looked around. He was in the middle of the street. He made an effort to mentally reconstruct his last movements. He was so beside himself that he must have stepped off the sidewalk without paying attention to the traffic. The driver hadn't tried to run him over; Yiannis had thrown himself under the car's wheels without looking. His old heart was pounding in his chest and the ankle he'd just twisted was aching. Yes, he really was an imbecile.

CHAPTER THIRTY.

Should it prove necessary, Nopal could disappear in under an hour. He had half a dozen secret apartments scattered throughout the world and a handful of fake ident.i.ties at his disposal. In other words, Pablo Nopal wasn't always Pablo Nopal. In fact, half of the memorist's existence remained submerged in the dark waters of the invisible, like the artificial icebergs in the Bear Pavilion. Year after year, with persistence and a notable talent for the clandestine, the writer had been constructing himself a parallel life. Dummy companies, front men who had no idea for whom they were working, ID tags so perfectly forged that they were impossible to detect. (They were, in reality, genuine IDs produced by corrupt officials.) And a secret network of informers, because there's no power without knowledge. It may be true that money doesn't provide happiness, thought the memorist, but it buys security, which is more important and less volatile than happiness. What more could a sensible man aspire to than to be reasonably protected from pain? Even if one had to resort to socially condemned means and prohibited behavior to achieve it.

Nopal had not chosen to be like this. He had not voluntarily chosen the path of illegality, in the same way that the socially marginalized do not choose to be marginalized but instead find themselves banished to the other side of the line of what is deemed normal. Destiny had been unfair to the memorist, destiny had treated the memorist brutally, and he had been forced to learn to defend himself and to respond to violence with violence. The true survivor is the one who doesn't hesitate to do whatever is necessary to survive, and Nopal was not the sort to hesitate. He often admired himself, observed his own behavior with a somewhat surprised curiosity, because he was unable to understand how it was possible for someone like him, who loved life so little, to be capable of hanging onto it so tenaciously, so fiercely. Maybe he did it out of pride, out of a firm decision never ever again to allow himself to be humiliated. Or maybe it was a question of cells behaving naturally, as they should, of the determination of the body to continue existing, of that feverish yearning to live that made many terminally ill people fight to their last breath to extend their existence despite their pain and deterioration. Yes, the metaphor of the sick man isn't bad, thought the memorist. Nopal had always felt that there was something pathological about him, something that suffered. Life was an accursed illness that ended up killing you.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE.

Bruna entered her hotel room almost blindly; visual distortion was one of the devastating side effects of her migraine. She lunged at her backpack and took out a paramorphine injection. She still had three left of the eight doses the hospital had given her. She injected one into her arm with trembling hands and fell onto the bed totally exhausted, waiting for it to take effect. She immediately felt the drug begin to course lightly through her body, putting an end to the throbs of pain, reaching past the back of her throat with the freshness of snow, sweeping away the maelstrom of bright corpuscles that were preventing her from seeing. What an indescribable relief!

She opened her eyes with a small start. So, she'd fallen asleep. She looked at her watch: she'd lost an hour but felt extraordinarily well. Rested and like new. She was in the room she'd hired as Bruna, although she was still wearing her human disguise. When she'd reached the hotel, she could only think of laying her hands on the paramorphine and had disregarded her usual work practices. She hoped that no one had seen her going into the room and that no one had checked the security tapes. It had been a mistake, but in any case she was going to leave the hotel right away. She jumped up and quickly began to rid herself of Annie Heart. When Husky reappeared in the mirror with the tattoo line scoring her body (dividing her, tying her down, as the essentialist put it), she felt strangely happy. It was like recovering an old friend.

She packed her bag and moved on to Annie's room to pick up her belongings in there as well. She had almost finished when someone knocked on the door.

"d.a.m.n."

She checked the screen and saw the image of a robot. She smiled, suddenly cheerful: she had just remembered the plasma gun. Maybe that cretinous Serra hadn't canceled the deal. When she opened the door, she saw that the robot was an old, battered courier. It probably didn't have visual verification capacity, which suited her. When the machine sensed Bruna's presence, it began to produce sentences on its display screen.

Package for Annie Heart Delivery subject to personal verification ID please The detective took out the fake ID tag provided by Mirari and held it up to the robot's eye. The antiquated pile of metal gave a beep of confirmation.

ID accepted Delivery requires prepayment 500 gaias in bills Bruna went out into the corridor and walked to the automated teller machine that was on every floor next to the elevator. She paid for the two rooms, Annie's and her own, and then withdrew five hundred Gs from her account. She returned to the robot and put the money through the opening. The cover on the safety deposit box opened and a pretty, electronic Thai ma.s.sage kit appeared.

"Hey, what the devil?"

The robot was already disappearing down the corridor, squeaking as it went. Bruna was on the verge of making it come back and demanding the return of her money, but then she thought better of it. She went back inside her room, cleared the top of the small table and opened the package. Inside was a strange, egg-shaped, silicon object with wheels and suction cups-presumably the Thai ma.s.sage kit-capable of automatically ma.s.saging, sucking, and applying soothing oils as it traveled over your body. The contraption had a central opening through which to insert the various liquids, and when Bruna opened it, she found the plasma gun inside. An ingenious hiding spot: the shape of the weapon had been adapted to that of the ma.s.sage machine. The gun looked homemade and ugly; it looked as if it had been made from recycled, mismatched parts. That explained why the gun was so cheap. She set the weapon to minimal charge and micro-impact, pointed it to one side of the bed and fired. There was a slight, silent throb of light, then Bruna bent down and confirmed that there was a minuscule hole in the bedspread, something like the hole left by a moth. It looked like the ugly, junky machine did in fact work. Better than nothing. Things were becoming too dangerous to go around unarmed.

When she left the Majestic, night had already closed in but the air felt slightly warmer; the polar crisis was beginning to relax its grip. Although she was burdened by the weight of her bags, she didn't even try to catch a cab: it was a given that at that hour, with the fear that prevailed, no one would stop for a rep. The travelators were working again, and Bruna walked quickly to combat the cold and to escape from the barrage coming from the public screens, which continued to show pictures of violent technohumans, supremacist declarations, interviews with Chem Cones and Hericio, and news of other, similar disturbances happening in various corners of the USE. The screens were burning with racial hatred. Bruna wondered if the beginnings of the Rep War had been like this. Would the androids have felt just as persecuted, just as plague-ridden, in that fateful year of 2060? Would the Jews have felt the same in the twentieth century? Would they have sensed the beginning of their end in the same way that she now sensed the political and legal escalation in the campaign against technohumans? Four years, three months, and thirteen days. The way things were going, what tragedies could happen in the four years she had left? She didn't even know if she'd manage to live until her TTT. The future was crushing black rock, the roar of an avalanche.

Central Archive, the United States of the Earth.

Modifiable version ACCESS STRICTLY LIMITED.

AUTHORIZED EDITORS ONLY.

Madrid, January 30, 2109, 10:30

Good morning, Yiannis

ACCESS DENIED.

YIANNIS LIBEROPOULOS IS AN UNAUTHORIZED.

EDITOR.

IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A VALID CODE.

QUIT THESE PAGES IMMEDIATELY.

ACCESS STRICTLY LIMITED.

AUTHORIZED EDITORS ONLY.

UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS IS A CRIMINAL OFFENSE.

PUNISHABLE BY IMPRISONMENT UP TO.

A MAXIMUM OF TWENTY YEARS.

YIANNIS LIBEROPOULOS, YOU ARE ADVISED TO QUIT THESE PAGES IMMEDIATELY.

ANY ATTEMPT TO PERSIST IN FORCING THE SYSTEM WILL GENERATE AN ALERT TO THE POLICE IN THIRTY SECONDS.

COUNTDOWN TO POLICE ALERT.

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