Year's Best Scifi 2 Part 16

LOVE ISN'T ENOUGH. I TRIED.

BUT SHE HURTS SO BAD.SHE HURTS FROM THE BIG R.

SHE CAN'T FORGET.

I went to him immediately. The under-Highway had been stripped. It was stark, long flat stretches of road and gutted buildings. AIs functioned on minimal loop programs, responding to random stimuli.

The couple had moved from the cottage. Bloom told me rural was nothing but stuttering patterns. Their new place broke my heart. It was just a box, a couple of sleep racks and some feed lines. It wavered like a dying scan, kept alive by nothing but desperate Will. Trust, Love, whatever you want to call it.

Zera was still lovely, despite the blue storms behind her eyes and the new twist to her spine. She had some difficulty speaking. "You are the nice-nice-the Bloom's-friend friendly-having to do with friendship-goodwill. h.e.l.lo."

The program was disintegrating.

I took Bloom outside where the sky bubbled like red soup boiling.

Bloom looked at me, and the smile he'd worn for Zera disappeared. I thought he would cry. His eyes were red. His lips were chapped and there was dried blood on his stubbled chin.

"I tried," he said. "I really tried."

His hands dropped to his sides as his voice grew thinner.

"She's a holo," I said. "She's an artificial intelligence mapped from a real person. But she's not real."

"Zera," he moaned.

I clutched his shoulder and shook him.

"We've got to get out," I said.

"They hurt her too much," he said.

"Who?"

"The ones who did it. Whoever. All of them.

"We've got to go now," I said.

"It was worse," he said. "It would have been bad enough if they were lovers in Big R. That would have been a major rift. But it was rape."

"No contract, you mean," I said.

Bloom shook his head. "No. Rape. The old meaning. Trumble raped her. Forced her against her will."

The under-Highway was coming apart around us. A shadow rolled over us and I looked up to see something dark and vast fly over on mechanical wings. It uttered shrieks of rage as it rose into the red sky.

A drone exploded on the street, and its head rolled by, repeating a servant mantra. If there is anything I can do please... if there is anything I can do please... if there is anything 1 can do please....I felt a chill deeper than any virtual prompt.

"Of course," I said, although I could not say then just what it was that had achieved clarity-horror alone, perhaps.

"Her name," I said. "What is her name?"

"She won't tell me," Bloom said. "It hurts her to remember. It causes... new disturbances. I think-"

I saw her over his shoulder. She came out of the house, running. She was oscillating. She threw her arms in the air, her many, wavering arms, and screamed.

"Zera!" Bloom shouted, and he turned and ran toward her. He embraced her.

"Don't!" I yelled. Every action and reaction was too late.

She tried, I think, to back away.

Bloom erupted in flames, green flames that the collapsing walls reflected as they fell.

Scales flowered on the street beneath my feet as it turned into a monstrous serpent and began to glide into a black pit.

I leapt away, found something like a real street, and fled.

"I'm sorry," the tech said when he pulled me from Deprive.

"Yes," I said. "I know."

Gloria and I signed a special contract to attend Bloom's negation ceremony together.

"That was uplifting," Gloria said at the ceremony's conclusion. Bloom was of no particular faith, so a renowned logic had been hired to utter affirmations.

"Yes," I said. "I am inspired."

Gloria gave me a skeptical look.

I was inspired, although not, perhaps, in the intended fashion. I was struck by the arbitrariness of events, of life's essential meaninglessness. I saw myself standing on the last shreds of the under-Highway, right before it blew, listening to my partner anguish over a renegade hologram, and I envied his emotion, his pain-embraced love.

I resolved to find Zera's source. Listening to the Logic's voice drone on about essence and being and defined goodness, I knew that a l.u.s.t for vengeance was all I had.

I went home after the ceremony and called V -Concepts and they sent over two techs to dismantle the rain forest and install the latest neutrals. I wasn't ready to head out to the Grit, but I was beginning to weary of virtual specifics. Good timing. When Baker finished slapping suits on me, I'd be out of the business anyway.

The techs knew their job, and they had the rain forest packed and the neutrals installed that same day.

The white s.p.a.ce felt a little stark, and I knew it would take some fine tuning.

I sat in artificial twilight and watched the American Midnight playbacks. I watched them over and overagain, mindlessly. I keyed loops, and I stared unblinking at the replicating images.

My mind traveled elsewhere. I thought, I'm gonna cancel the contract with Gloria. I don't care what it sets me back.

Contracts no longer excited me. Gloria could have whispered a thousand legal injunctions in my ear, and I would have felt no tremor of l.u.s.t. I understood something of Trumble's behavior. He was a throw-back to the Decadence, back when people entered s.e.xual relationships without any legal counsel or strictures, often long before twenty-five, the present age of consent. He had been a sick man. A dream had sucked him in, and he had unraveled. He had gone looking for Zera's human source, and he had gone looking with all the resources of a rich man and all the determination of a madman. He had found her. And Baker had to have known about it.

I would never prove it, but surely Baker had killed Sammy Hood. There might be other suspects, but Baker was the only one with the ability to breech Security at ComWick.

I studied Zera Terminal as her mouth opened and her tongue licked her upper lip in a slow, lazy roll.

Even on a flat, desire permeated the screen.

I watched Zera Terminal, naked, pout. I watched her stamp her foot in childish pique. I watched her eyes flash.

Who are you? I wondered.

I understood Bloom's obsession with a holo. "Is love Big R or Little R?" he had asked.

A graduate in rational metaphysics might have had trouble answering that one. Do you hunger for the body or the soul?

The American Midnight flats unsettled me. I could not then say why, although the truth, once revealed, way obvious-and would be, I thought, to every Viewer d.a.m.ned by it.

Like that famous, pre-Decadence character Hamlet, I wasn't getting anywhere with the philosophical loops. Vengeance required some action.

I needed the name of Zera's human-map, but I could be killed the minute my search surfaced in a C-View Actions file. So I was careful. I found nothing in the open files.

It was Captain Armageddon who gave me the name.

I was watching the recorded playbacks from the under-Highway. I watched the amok Armageddon tearing Jim Havana into pieces. The regressing holo spoke in a garbled rattle. The name was there: Keravnin. There were four Keravnins locally-and only one was a probable.

She lived on Maplethorpe, down in the high-rent Op district. Keravnin read out as the only child of wealthy parents. She'd had a brief career as a model for s.e.x-boutique prototypes, but she'd never registered with any of the big agencies. She had the usual privileged list of social outlets, and old board files suggested an extended relate contract with Korl Mox, the sound,designer. They'd consummated the contract but signed off when their compatibility index slid to four. Her current relate file was uninformative. It could have been tampered with, or perhaps Keravnin wasn't of sufficient social standing to warrant a longer report on the Window.

Her profile showed the standard cultural acquisitiveness. There was a narcissistic strain in the emotion modules she bought. She had a thing for old film prints. And she had a pa.s.sion for late-twentieth centuryCDs, specializing in fashionable pretense-pop.

That was my entrance. I wrote myself a retro-senario as a collector. It wouldn't stand under scrutiny, so I would just have to hope no one was looking.

I sold her two CDs on the Net before I suggested we meet.

I sat in her pricey Op digs, cradling a Michael Penn CD that I was going to let her have for half of what it cost me.

Sennie Keravnin was not what I expected. Two years down from forty, her beauty was intact, but there was something brittle in her every gesture, some shrillness in her laughter. I saw her twenty years from now in a new cosmetic workup, coyly signing short-term contracts. I was looking for the connection with Zera Terminal, and looking, I found it. The same high cheekbones, the same elegant jaw line. The holo had obviously been a fantasized facsimile (still a gray agree at Morals). Keravnin looked like Zera Terminal if I squinted my eyes. But, in some fundamental way, there was no connection at all.

We talked about pretense pop, agreed that groups with any sense of humor were second-rate, that the great strength of such music was its self-referential seriousness.

She was a heavy fan. I'd done my homework, but I didn't know half the names. Fortunately, an occasional murmur of a.s.sent was all she required.

I had ample time to study the room while she talked. It was generic in its way: expensive holoprints, temp walls, organic projections. A wall shelf held a number of tactile-dolls, including the popular Koala AI. I found these artifacts of girlhood depressing. There should be an age cut-off for cute. Again, I saw Sennie Keravnin inhabiting her future, cuddling a worn childhood toy, smiling coyly at some tarnished father figure.

We talked for perhaps twenty minutes. I sold her the CD and left.

I went home. I thought about Keravnin. She didn't look like a rape victim. But what did I know about that? What did a rape victim look like? It was a crime requiring access, a crime from the Decadence, a crime now out of context.

If I could prove that she had been raped, and that Baker knew about it, I could have Baker put away forever. Trumble was dead; I couldn't kill him again, but I could shut down the engineer of all this evil.

For Bloom. Who bloomed so briefly. Just a kid. I saw Bloom and Zera wrestling in the garden, water and laughter exploding in the air.

I knew then. I knew the way everyone will know when it hits the Window. And I guess it will take a while to take it in. The knowing carries some emotional freight, and it isn't processed easily.

I logged on. I called up Keravnin's medical. There it was. Nothing hidden. What's to hide when no one is looking?

I called Morals and left a message for a guy named Gill Hedron. I turned the flat-view off and went out into the night.

I sat in a Sympathy bar and waited for Hedron to arrive. I had no doubt that he would come. Hedron was a lieutenant with Morals.

"My partner and I did the Armageddon wipe," I had told the interface. "I've got something that will putJell Baker away."

Hedron was the man who had logged the most time on the Baker file at Morals. I figured Hedron was frustrated, willing to take a chance.

He came. He was a small, unshaven guy, and like every righteous I'd ever met out of Morals, he spoke in short, edited bursts of disbelief.

"Yeah, I got nothing better to do," he said when I thanked him for coming. "Maybe I'll kick your a.s.s, just for something to do."

I told him what I knew.

He listened. When I finished, he said, "You got nothing."

"But we could get it," I said.

"You don't have anything to lose," he told me. "I still got some prospects. I still got dreams."

"Ever dream of closing the lid on Baker?" I asked.

Hedron sighed. I could see my eloquence had won him over.

Driving into the Op, I thought about American Midnight. It sold s.e.x, sure, but so did every other holoshow. s.e.x wasn't a rare item. Most shows logged a couple of weeks and were gone. American Midnight was running strong at eight months when Trumble took himself out. Why the long run?

Because Midnight had something new to sell.

Hedron called into Morals and had them shut down all security traps and failsafes for the Keravnin res.

We rendezvoused with three Sony cops and a coordinating Legal and were in the building in two minutes.

We blew the door, Legal started recording, and Sennie Keravnin came running out of the bedroom.

There was panic on her sleep-rumpled face, but something calculating took command; you could almost watch the fear scuttle for ratholes. If I had looked deep into her eyes, I probably could have seen the thoughts pa.s.sing. Can Baker get me out of this? What's the best deal? Can I nail these a.s.sholes on an unwarranted?

I walked past her, down the long hall, and stopped as the door slid open and the curly headed child came blinking into the light. She wore a blue shift with cartoon Towsers on it. Her Koala-doll clung to her neck.

"Mommy?" the girl said.

"Sara," I said, "it's all right. Everything is okay."

She looked at me with those famous eyes. "I don't know you."

"It's okay," I said.

"I want my mommy." They hadn't altered the voice at all. This was Zera's voice in all its wonder and trust.

The voice match-up alone would have been enough to shut C-View down.