Noir

“Glad you like it.” McNihil splashed a little more scotch into the glass on the counter; he knew Turbiner wouldn’t mind that he’d helped himself. “I’ll let the techs know, back at the agency, that it met with your approval.”

Actually, it did sound better. McNihil had known there would be an improvement, but hadn’t been quite prepared for this order of magnitude. The bass coming out of the subwoofer was deep and clean, with no cheap-’n’-fuzzy boom-box reverb; the drum strokes hammering out from the back of the invisible orchestra were as tight as the heads on the timpani themselves. The old guy had had a good setup before, but now McNihil could sense the actual physical structure of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw responding in synch to the music, a nearly subliminal tremble coming up through the floorboards and into the soles of his shoes.

Pretty good for a shuck, thought McNihil. Which it was:

• For death to be effective public policy, it must be public. If the message to be gotten across is, Connect around with someone else’s copyrights and you die, an emotionally resonant depiction of that truth had to be created.

• Witnessing the death of intellectual-property pirates-taping and broadcasting the various raids and apprehensions, getting the videocam lenses in close for the spattering blood, the wide-eyed look in some jerk’s eyes as the cold circle at the front of some large-caliber tannhauser was set against the bridge of his nose, his stare going cross-eyed as he watched the trigger being slowly pulled back-that worked at the beginning. High ratings and message through-put, audience retention up above the ninetieth percentile.

• Then the drop-off, wire share falling along with the novelty factor; after the first dozen or so punks have their brains removed out the backs of their skulls, after a few good raids on rogue Chinese factories, with the new, improved Smart-Enuff® bombs sniffing out illicit CD-ROM’s and then scattering polycarbonate and body parts with equal facility; after everybody had seen stuff like that, the message migrated to the subconscious level of people’s minds, instead of staying up top where the Collection Agency and its clients wanted it.

• Plus there was the suicide factor involved. Various jerks, operating out of the same tired ideological agenda and hippie wish-fulfillment dream, who wanted to martyr themselves for the muddled and not-very-well-thought-out cause of “free” information; or the terminally and personally screwed-up, who saw the Collection Agency’s asp- heads as a neat and public way of bringing about their own demise-either way, the threat of death was in fact the promise of death for enough people to be a continuing trouble. Even if minor, it was still something that needed to be dealt with; the agency dealt in absolutes, its net tight enough to allow no one to wriggle through.

• This called for a certain amount of rethinking on the Collection Agency’s part. Did death necessarily = punishment? The main problem with death as a negative motivational factor was that it was over too quickly, and not always painfully enough.

• Obviously, what was needed was to stretch death out in time, take it from a point to an extended process. And pump up the pain and humiliation factors.

Thus, thought McNihil, the creation of the trophy system. It worked even better.

THIRTEEN

A FLUTTERING MOTH IN THE DEVIL’S COIN-PURSE

Here.” McNihil had poured a shot for his host; standing beside the sweet-spot chair, he handed the glass to Turbiner. “Maybe this’ll heighten the effect even more.”

“Thanks.” The old man took the glass and sipped, then nodded in appreciation. He kept his gaze aimed straight ahead, at the place between the two main speakers. “You hear that?” He nodded toward the unseen orchestra. “You clean up the bass, the midrange sorts itself out, too. Just less audible crap in general.”

McNihil placed himself back on the couch, careful not to spill his own refilled glass. From there, he could watch as the other man let himself be drawn back under the music’s engulfing tide. They were already at the third movement, In ruhig flie?ender Bewegung. Warmed by the scotch, McNihil listened, admiring the way the new cable brought the subterranean rumble of the basses into the flat. Admiring, despite what he knew of the nature of such trophies:

• The vindictive principle largely determined how the Collection Agency structured its compensation protocols. If someone stole from one of their clients-stole by way of infringing, pirating the client’s copyright-protected material-then the agency saw the pirate’s entire person as being essentially in forfeit to the client. If the client had a right to demand the pirate’s death, then why not the pirate’s life as well? The pirate as a living entity? And more to the purpose of providing an object lesson to anyone thinking about ripping off one of the agency’s clients-as a suffering entity as well.

• Thus, an important evolution in the nature of trophies came about. At the beginning, when physical death was required-absolute physical death, with no parts surviving-trophies took form in less satisfying, less temporally extended ways. McNihil had read about these; they were slightly before his time in the agency-

• One author of romance novels, living somewhere in the English Cotswolds with a posse of beloved felines, had the three on-wire and unauthorized purveyors of her old books delivered to her in the form of canned, vitamin- enhanced cat food, suitably minced and labeled, the bones powdered and stirred in for the extra calcium essential to a healthy animal’s diet;

• A mystery writer in New York City, still maintaining his rooftop garden long after the depopulation of the buildings around him, had a CD-ROM packager-who’d been running a sideline of distributing out-of-print tides for which he hadn’t bothered to pay any royalties-delivered to him in the form of three sacks of bone meal and fertilizer. The roses did very well that year and the next.

• The beginning of the shuckness was in examples such as these. A chopped-up human being was justice, but not necessarily nutrition; the cans with the late pirates’ scowling faces on the label had to have extra soy and fish- farm protein mixed in. Same with the fertilizer, only there the human portion didn’t even hit the fifty-percent mark. As with so many things in life, it was the thought that counted. And the deaths.

• The same principle applied when it was determined that the agency’s trophies, for maximum educational and moral value, should be living and not just dead things. In the cables lacing up AlexTurbiner’s stereo system, there was actual human cerebral tissue, the essential parts of the larcenous brains of those who’d thought it would be either fun or profitable to rip off an old, forgotten scribbler like him. Conceptually attached to the cables, the old ones he’d already had and the new slimmed-down subwoofer cable that McNihil had just delivered to him, was a lot of audio-nerd gabble about the superiority of soft-’n’-wet neural-based technology for high-end sound systems, coherent full-spectrum wave delivery, optimized impedance matching, the transfer function between synapses quicker than that through the crystalline structure of metal conductors, et cetera, et cetera, yadda yadda yadda.

• Only… that was bull. The Collection Agency knew it; everybody who worked for the agency, the administrators and accountants, the techs and asp-heads out in the fields, they all knew the basic shuckness of it. At the center of the cerebral tissue inside Turbiner’s cables, running through it like the digestive tract of a mosquito surrounded by its minute insect brain, was a core of thin-film cryo-insulated stabilized quasi-liquid silver. The precious metal-made even more so by the expensive high tech that had transformed it-had the conductive qualities of ordinary silver, enhanced by the mercurylike room-temperature flow and lack of crystalline-structure inhibitory factors. That was why the cables sounded so good, rolled out bass like the shoes of God, made the percussion section’s tubular bells ring like skinny angels. The brain matter scooped from the skulls of copyright infringers had nothing to do-in truth-with the sound the cables made possible, though the agency’s claim was that it did.

• The brain matter, the still-living remnant of the various pirates, was there for one purpose. To suffer.

McNihil set down his glass and pushed himself up from the depths of the couch. He walked over to the stereo- equipment rack, being careful not to get in between Turbiner and the full impact of the music. Kneeling down beside the new cable’s boalike curve, he dug another piece of asp-head equipment from his jacket pocket, something no