‘Fine,’ Joe snapped. ‘We no longer care.’
She made an obscene gesture and hurried back through the mansion. For a moment I thought Joe was going to run after her. I’d never seen him so angry. Instead he turned to his wife who was frozen in her chair, shaking slightly. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked tenderly.
She nodded bravely, her eyes slowly becoming unfocused.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Joe said bitterly. ‘We didn’t spoil her, we were very careful about that. Then about a year ago she started hanging out with the wrong sort: we’ve been living in a nightmare ever since. She’s quit school; she’s got a drug habit, she steals from us constantly, I can’t remember how many times she’s been arrested for joyriding and shoplifting.’
‘I’m sorry. Kids huh!’
‘Teenagers,’ he said wretchedly. ‘Fiona needed two Prozac gland implants to cope.’
I smiled over at Heloise who’d started playing with the kitten again. ‘At least you’ve got her.’
‘Yes.’ Joe seemed to make some kind of decision. ‘Before you leave, I’d like you to perform the cellular stasis-regeneration procedure for me.’
‘I don’t understand. I explained before, it’s simply the first stage of verifying the overwrite sequence we developed.’
His smile hardened. ‘Nevertheless, you will do it again. Without my help you will be going back to prison for a long time.’
‘It’s of no use to adults,’ I said helplessly. ‘You won’t become young, or even maintain your current age.’
‘It’s not for me,’ he said.
‘Then who…’ I followed his gaze to Heloise. ‘Oh.’
‘She’s perfect just the way she is,’ he said with a gentle smile. ‘And that, Doctor, is the way she’s going to stay.’
Blessed by an Angel
Imelda leaves her modest family home as the evening shade washes over the front garden, a coy smile lifting her maroon-glossed lips. She’s off to see her lover, a prospect which lifts her heart and enhances her buoyant nature. The sun is slowly sinking behind the gigantic seven-hundred-year-old arcology that dominates the centre of her home town, Kuhmo, casting a shadow which methodically stretches out to darken the town’s outlying districts. It is a sharp eclipse which she has witnessed every evening of her seventeen years. Yet the gloaming it brings does nothing to stifle her mood; she’s a happy, beautiful girl with an enchantingly flat face and pert nose, her auburn hair flowing below her shoulders. Tonight she’s chosen a sleeveless blue and white dress to wear, its semiorganic fabric swirling jauntily around her long legs. Wherever she goes she attracts wistful glances from the boys who linger along Kuhmo’s boring streets as they search for something to do before the night is out.
She turns into Rustwith Street, one of the broad thoroughfares which radiate out from the hexagonal base of the tapering arcology. Tall novik trees line this street as they do all the major routes cutting through the civic centre, their woolly blue-green foliage a deliberate counterpoint to the bleak mountainous walls of the arcology. There are vehicles driving down the wide road, primitive vehicles with wheels powered by electric motors. This world of Anagaska has never really benefited from the bountiful wealth flowing among the Greater Commonwealth planets, its citizens seemingly content to bumble along their own slow cautious development route, decades if not centuries behind the more dynamic worlds. And this provincial town is very set in its ways, manacled to the past by the arcology which dominates the local mindset much as it does the landscape.
There are some modern regrav capsules in the air above the roads: shiny colourful ovoids as big as the cars below, skimming silently along at their regulation fifteen-metres altitude which puts them level with the upper branches of the trees.
Imelda pays the traffic no attention as she hurries along to the cafe where she has arranged to meet her lover; like the arcology the buzz of vehicles is a mere background fixture. So she is completely unaware of the chrome green capsule gliding along at walking pace several hundred metres behind her, maintaining a steady distance. The two Advancer Protectorate members inside are observing her through sensors meshed with the capsule’s metal skin, and a deluge of scrutineer programs they have scattered across the local net. Their organization might not be official, but they have access to police codes, allowing them to pursue their clandestine business undetected within the town’s electronic and physical architecture.
As Imelda turns into the Urwan Plaza with its throng of pedestrians several wolf-whistles and raunchy pings are thrown in her direction. The scrutineers examine the pings for hidden code, but the boys and young men who sent them are intent only on compliments and hopeful for a smile. Imelda does smile breezily, but keeps on walking. She is using virtually none of her Advancer functions, the macrocellular clusters supplementing her nervous system are barely interfaced with the planetary cybersphere. Exoimages and mental icons are folded back into her peripheral vision, untouched by her neural hands. Secondary thought routines operating inside her macrocellular clusters monitor several relevant events. She is pleased to see Sabine, her younger sister, has finally reached their aunt’s house in New Helsinki: there was a long delay at Inubo station while she waited for the delayed regrav bus connection. Imelda is quietly relieved, she loves her sister dearly, but Sabine is quite a ditzy girl; that kind of foul-up was likely to panic her. Imelda’s other interest is Erik Horovi, who is not merely on time, but well ahead of schedule, waiting for her in the Pathfinder cafe. An exoimage from the cafe’s net reveals him to be sitting at a booth table ordering the stewardbot to stand by. Her neural hands grip the exoimage and expand it, sliding the focus in towards his face. His own clusters must be alerting him to the observation for he grins round at the camera. She sends him a tactile ping, hand-squeezing-thigh, and says: ‘I’ll be there soon, order for me.’
His grin broadens at the ping, and he calls the stewardbot over.
It is all manufactured. Erik, his location, his responses, are in fact all being cooked up by a simulacrum program running in a large processor kube on the arcology’s seventy-fifth floor. The same suite of abandoned rooms where Erik’s unconscious body is lying, fastened to a field-medical cot. But the program has fooled Imelda and she hurries on through the plaza.
Her route takes her out through one of the side paths before turning into a narrow opening between two buildings. The alleys here form a small maze as they link up to the rear of a dozen commercial buildings. But she’s perfectly safe. The walls might be high, and old, and dark; there may be rubbish scattered over the concrete, and there may not be any people about, but this is Kuhmo, and she remains linked to the cybersphere. Imelda is a thoroughly modern child of the Commonwealth, she knows that safety and the police are only the speed of a thought away.
A lustrous green regrav capsule descends into the alley ahead of her. It’s unusual, but she doesn’t hesitate. She’s mildly puzzled, because it’s a large capsule, and she sees it’s going to be difficult for her to squeeze round. Just how stupid and inconsiderate is the pilot program?
Her link to the cybersphere falls away. Imelda comes to an uncertain halt, frowning suspiciously at the capsule. She’s never been disconnected since the macrocellular clusters became active the year she reached sexual maturity. The cybersphere and beyond that the all-embracing Commonwealth unisphere are her eternal companions; they are her
A malmetal door expands on the regrav capsule. Paul Alkoff steps out. The Protectorate team’s chief is a tall man, over four hundred years old, and twenty years out of rejuvenation; like just about everyone with an Advancer genetic heritage his biological age is locked into his early thirties.
‘You’re in the way,’ Imelda protests. ‘And I think your capsule is messing with reception.’
‘Sorry about that,’ Paul says. A quick review of his exoimages shows him their kube is producing an optimum digital shadow of Imelda. Friends and family all think she’s still walking along the alley en route to the cafe. He holds his left hand up towards her, and the smallest weapon he’s wetwired with fires a stun pulse.
Imelda feels nothing. The world shifts round her, and she realizes she’s fallen to the ground. There is no pain
