I gaped. This was worse than what the hacker had done to me. But there was no way to run from it.
“You work for them?” I asked.
“The pardon you sold me wasn’t any good. You knew that, didn’t you? I had someone waiting for me in San Diego, but when I tried to get through the wall they stopped me just like that, and dragged me away screaming. I could have killed you. I would have gone to San Diego and then we would have tried to make it to Hawaii in his boat.”
“I didn’t know about the guy in San Diego,” I said.
“Why should you? It wasn’t your business. You took my money, you were supposed to get me my pardon. That was the deal.”
Her eyes were gray with golden sparkles in them. I had trouble looking into them.
“You still want to kill me?” I asked. “Are you planning to kill me now?”
“No and no.” She used my old name again. “I can’t tell you how astounded I was, when they brought you in here. A pardoner, they said. John Doe. Pardoners, that’s my department. They bring all of them to me. I used to wonder years ago if they’d ever bring you in, but after a while I figured, no, not a chance, he’s probably a million miles away, he’ll never come back this way again. And then they brought in this John Doe, and I saw your face.”
“Do you think you could manage to believe,” I said, “that I’ve felt guilty for what I did to you ever since? You don’t have to believe it. But it’s the truth.”
“I’m sure it’s been unending agony for you.”
“I mean it. Please. I’ve stiffed a lot of people, yes, and sometimes I’ve regretted it and sometimes I haven’t, but you were one that I regretted. You’re the one I’ve regretted most. This is the absolute truth.”
She considered that. I couldn’t tell whether she believed it even for a fraction of a second, but I could see that she was considering it.
“Why did you do it?” she asked after a bit.
“I stiff people because I don’t want to seem too perfect,” I told her. “You deliver a pardon every single time, word gets around, people start talking, you start to become legendary. And then you’re known everywhere and sooner or later the Entities get hold of you, and that’s that. So I always make sure to write a lot of stiffs. I tell people I’ll do my best, but there aren’t any guarantees, and sometimes it doesn’t work.”
“You deliberately cheated me.”
“Yes.”
“I thought you did. You seemed so cool, so professional. So perfect. I was sure the pardon would be valid. I couldn’t see how it would miss. And then I got to the wall and they grabbed me. So I thought, that bastard sold me out. He was too good just to have flubbed it up.” Her tone was calm but the anger was still in her eyes. “Couldn’t you have stiffed the next one? Why did it have to be me?”
I looked at her for a long time.
“Because I loved you,” I said.
“Shit,” she said. “You didn’t even know me. I was just some stranger who had hired you.”
“That’s just it. There I was full of all kinds of crazy instant lunatic fantasies about you, all of a sudden ready to turn my nice orderly life upside down for you, and all you could see was somebody you had hired to do a job. I didn’t know about the guy from San Diego. All I knew was I saw you and I wanted you. You don’t think that’s love? Well, call it something else, then, whatever you want. I never let myself feel it before. It isn’t smart, I thought, it ties you down, the risks are too big. And then I saw you and I talked to you a little and I thought something could be happening between us and things started to change inside me, and I thought, Yeah, yeah, go with it this time, let it happen, this may make everything different. And you stood there not seeing it, not even beginning to notice, just jabbering on and on about how important the pardon was for you. So I stiffed you. And afterwards I thought, Jesus, I ruined that girl’s life and it was just because I got myself into a snit, and that was a fucking petty thing to have done. So I’ve been sorry ever since. You don’t have to believe that. I didn’t know about San Diego. That makes it even worse for me.” She didn’t say anything all this time, and the silence felt enormous. So after a moment I said, “Tell me one thing, at least. That guy who wrecked me in Pershing Square: who was he?”
“He wasn’t anybody,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“He isn’t a who. He’s a
“Oh,” I said. “Oh.”
“The report is that you gave it one hell of a workout.”
“It gave me one too. Turned my brain half to mush.”
“You were trying to drink the sea through a straw. For a while it looked like you were really going to do it, too. You’re one goddamned hacker, you know that?”
“Why did you go to work for them?” I said.
She shrugged. “Everybody works for them. Except people like you. You took everything I had and didn’t give me my pardon. So what was I supposed to do?”
“I see.”
“It’s not such a bad job. At least I’m not out there on the wall. Or being sent off for TTD.”
“No,” I said. “It’s probably not so bad. If you don’t mind working in a room with such a high ceiling. Is that what’s going to happen to me? Sent off for TTD?”
“Don’t be stupid. You’re too valuable.”
“To whom?”
“The system always needs upgrading. You know it better than anyone alive. You’ll work for us.”
“You think I’m going to turn borgmann?” I said, amazed.
“It beats TTD,” she said.
I fell silent again. I was thinking that she couldn’t possibly be serious, that they’d be fools to trust me in any kind of responsible position. And even bigger fools to let me near their computer.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll do it. On one condition.”
“You really have balls, don’t you?”
“Let me have a rematch with that android of yours. I need to check something out. And afterward we can discuss what kind of work I’d be best suited for here. Okay?”
“You know you aren’t in any position to lay down conditions.”
“Sure I am. What I do with computers is a unique art. You can’t make me do it against my will. You can’t make me do anything against my will.”
She thought about that. “What good is a rematch?”
“Nobody ever beat me before. I want a second try.”
“You know it’ll be worse for you than before.”
“Let me find that out.”
“But what’s the point?”
“Get me your android and I’ll show you the point,” I said.
She went along with it. Maybe it was curiosity, maybe it was something else, but she patched herself into the computer net and pretty soon they brought in the android I had encountered in the park, or maybe another one with the same face. It looked me over pleasantly, without the slightest sign of interest.
Someone came in and took the security lock off my wrist and left again. She gave the android its instructions and it held out its wrist to me and we made contact. And I jumped right in.
I was raw and wobbly and pretty damned battered, still, but I knew what I needed to do and I knew I had to do it fast. The thing was to ignore the android completely—it was just a terminal, it was just a unit—and go for what lay behind it. So I bypassed the android’s own identity program, which was clever but shallow. I went right around it while the android was still setting up its combinations, dived underneath, got myself instantly from the unit level to the mainframe level and gave the master Culver City computer a hearty handshake.
Jesus, that felt good!
