‘They harvest them, don’t they?’ said Salind, his attention drawn to the large tanker parked under some distant banoaks. He could hear the cavitating roar of a vacuum pump and see another park labourer sucking up the creatures with a wide-ribbed hose.
‘I guess I’ll have to give that a try then,’ said Salind, though he did not particularly relish the prospect.
‘Then I’ll take a detoxicant course afterwards. My audience will want to know what it’s like.’
At the centre of the park stood a monolithic quartz crystal into whose lattices had been recorded the names and personal histories of the thousands who had died during the civil war here a century earlier. The deeply translucent crystal ran in its depths holograms taken randomly from those personal histories. Positioned all around it were seats for spectators, though they were unoccupied today and, studying the figure standing with his back to the crystal, Salind could understand why.
This man’s clothing resembled an antique acceleration suit with its webwork of veins sandwiched in metallic fabric. Pipes were also visible at his joints and curved up from the neck ring, and fluid vessels were affixed here and there on the suit’s surface. This clothing was not of great note though. Others dressed more exotically and few would so much as blink an eye at them. However, this man seemed ill: his face greyish and his eyes containing a sickly yellow tint.
When he turned to gaze up at the crystal, it became evident that the tubes from the neck ring entered the base of his skull. As Salind drew closer he noted fingertips frayed down to the bone, eye irrigators at the man’s temples, skull exposed through holes in shaven scalp. Closer still and he caught the first whiff of putrefaction. For what Garp suffered there was no cure — him being dead.
As soon as the Tarjen Network picked up on the story, Salind knew that it had to be his. It was a perfect footnote to the big story on Banjer at the moment: the imminent arrival of the Arbiter of Transition, the awesome AI Geronamid, and subsumption of this world into the Polity.
Since the civil war, during which a theocracy had been bloodily usurped then replaced by more conventional government, there had been plenty of murders solved, or not, by the usual methods. However, there had not been a reification of a murder victim in a hundred years.
When the strange cult of Anubis Arisen governed Banjer, every viable murder victim had been reified and sent after his murderer. The victim’s dead brain was decoded and the essential mind and memory downloaded into an augmentation. Cybermotors at the joints moved the body, which was partially preserved by chemicals. Obviously more complex than this, the system utilized, in some reifs, surviving brain tissue, and historians argued that such were still alive.
Others argued that reifs possessed self-determination and even whilst running fully on the augmentation were AI. For a century the whole argument had been moot, that is, until Garp came on the scene.
Salind had scanned the files at stopovers while en route to Banjer. Garp had been an inspector in the Banjer police force. The last five years of his life had been spent trying to convict a woman by the name of Deleen Soper, who had allegedly made a fortune manufacturing a drug called praist, somewhere on this world. During those five years he had made enough headway to become an annoyance to the Tronad — a criminal organization reputed to be close to seizing power on Banjer and of which Soper was, again allegedly, the head. Several ensuing attempts on his life impelled him to make a will specifying that should he die within a certain period he wanted to be reified, and for this purpose transferred funds to what was left of the Church of Anubis Arisen. Shortly after doing so, he revealed himself to be a praist addict going into terminal psychosis, turned up at the Church’s headquarters, and after presenting the relevant documentation, shot himself through the heart.
‘Hello, I’m Salind. I’m glad you agreed to speak to me.’ Salind held out his hand.
Garp stared at this member for a moment, but made no move to take it. After a clicking gulp deep in his throat he said, ‘I won’t shake your hand. I don’t yet know the strength of the cybermotors in my finger joints, also I shouldn’t think it very pleasant shaking hands with a corpse.’
Salind forced a grin and dropped his arm to his side.
‘Are you recording now?’ Garp asked.
‘I am, and obviously I have a lot of questions to ask you. .’
Garp held up one hideous palm. ‘One moment.’
At his throat he made an adjustment to a recessed control plate. There came a faint hissing sound. When he spoke next his voice was smoother. ‘That’s better. My vocal chords are decaying despite the vascular balm. Airborne bacteria.’
‘An unusual experience, I’d imagine,’ said Salind, feeling foolish.
Garp said nothing for a moment. Salind wondered if he was being given an annoyed look.
Perhaps he was, only Garp’s mummified features revealed nothing.
‘I’m a reif,’ was all he said. And with that he took a handgun from his belt and held it up for Salind to see.
‘Ah.’ Salind held off from putting a call for help through Argus. Banjer being out-Polity for the present, Polity monitors could do nothing, and it would take at least ten minutes for the Tarjen staffers to get to him. Anyway, episodes like this made a story. The weapon — an old station-developed rail-gun — was the sort of thing that carried a twenty-round box and had a range measured in metres rather than kilometres. Salind thought it better suited to a museum.
‘What exactly is that for?’ he asked, keeping his voice level.
