Noir

bigger than a handheld calculator with a few dangling gold-tipped wires. As the third movement of the Mahler hammered and steamed around him, McNihil inserted the thin metal probes into the matching sockets toward one end of the cable.

The device in his hand was a readout meter for the neural activity encapsulated in agency trophies. When the techs skinned down an apprehended pirate, reducing the brain to its essentials, the biggest part of what remained was the basic personality structure and an ongoing situational awareness. The person was still inside the object, alive and conscious. The techs also grafted on to the stripped sensory receptors a minimal interface structure, just enough for the canned scraps of a human being to know what had happened to it. When the techs finished up their jobs, they left the symbolic-manipulation subset of the personality intact, the brain’s language-formation centers still working.

On the face of the meter, a pair of red LED’s pulsed on, matching those on the cable’s surface, and signaling that the cerebral material inside the cable was up and running. On very rare occasions, a strokelike condition was spontaneously triggered, rapidly reducing the soft tissue connectors to a jellied pulp oozing out of the sheath’s porous wrap like grayed-out strawberry jam. When that happened, there was nothing to do but pull out the trophy and throw it back in its presentation box, return it to the agency labs for the techs to slice out the valuable electronics for recycling. Sad but true: the little bastard would have, in a case like that, escaped the grim immortality that his crimes had earned him. He’d be well and truly, one-hundred-percent dead, the collapsed brain matter fit only for tossing down the garbage chute to join the rest of his previously discarded body.

This guy’s doing just fine, noted McNihil, as he glanced at the numbers displayed below the hot red dots on the meter. The kid, the business that he’d gone north in the Gloss to take care of, was still there in the cable hooked up to Turbiner’s subwoofer. Or all that mattered of the kid was there. McNihil wondered if the agency’s techs had left enough memory circuits for the kid’s bottled personality to have a sensory recall of his last moments as a functioning, walking-around human being: the smell of the run-down theater’s stale popcorn, the quick and clammy flood of the hydro-gel across his face, the rush of panicky adrenaline as he’d struggled for a gulp of shut-off oxygen. He supposed there might be a memory flash floating around in there, of McNihil’s extended fingers poking an airway for the kid to breathe through, and then of his hands picking up the futilely struggling body and dragging it out of the theater. That, plus the kid’s awareness of his crime, what he’d done to get worked over and reduced this thoroughly, was all that was required, a sad little biography boiled down to its essential, remorseful parts.

McNihil held the meter up to his ear. The little wafer-thin speaker inside was just loud enough for him to pick up, without intruding on Turbiner’s enjoyment of the louder music, the verbalized outpouring from the soul inside the cable.

i’m sorry i’m sorry i’m sorry please please please please let me out out out-outoutout dark and cold and wet and stings sorry sorry sorry pleeeeeeeease

At times like this, McNihil felt like Mr. Scratch in the ancient black-and-white film All That Money Can Buy, with old Walter Huston back in 1941, radiating his evil, bright-eyed smile, the visual counterpart to all that creepy Bernard Herrmann soundtrack music. At least in the movie, sinners had to be tempted by a spooky Simone Simon to wind up as a fluttering moth in the devil’s coin-purse. Nowadays, in this modern world, all it took was one’s own stupidity, the kind above the neck rather than in the groin. McNihil took the meter an inch away from his ear, reducing the scrabbling, wailing voice to a distant, indecipherable noise, as though it were no more than RFI static on the dangling wires. All around the rim, and farther beyond, there were similar little voices, shouting inside their small damnations:

• Which was the point. A dead trophy did not have the moral and instructive impact of a living one. Living in the sense of there being the essence of the pirate, the skinned-down soul of the copyright infringer, that bit of brain tissue that held the larcenous personality, embodied in some common household appliance, its functions enhanced by the correct employment of what had once been a human being:

• Toasters were a popular trophy item. There was always a waiting list at the agency headquarters, clients who had put their names down, in case some fool messed with their copyrights. A great sense of satisfaction came with owning a little chrome-and-plastic box with a dial on the side for how dark you wanted the slices to come out-and a little chunk of cerebral matter wired onto the circuit board, making sure that the bread achieved the perfect state of golden crispness.

• Vacuum cleaners and in-sink garbage-disposal units-those were desired as well. The pleasure there came from the sense of someone who had stolen from you now being reduced to sucking up cat hair and miscellaneous lint from the carpet, or, whenever the switch on the kitchen wall was flicked, sluicing the unidentifiable, mold- covered soft objects from the fridge down the plumbing gullet wired to the pirate’s brain tissue. You want something of mine? Try this. Don’t choke, now…

• Other popular items: wall clocks, train sets for the kids, pocket appointment books with little built-in calculators (the recipients of those trophies had to be extra careful to keep fresh batteries in them, or the canned brain tissue would go off and start to smell funny), a new and improved version of the classic “Drinking Bird” toy… the variations were endless, dependent only upon the number of copyright infringers who got nabbed by the Collection Agency.

• Which were, understandably, fewer and fewer. Which was the point of such draconian measures. This was standard policing procedure, going back to and beyond the hard-core, take-no-prisoners attitude of the old, pre- reform LAPD. Plenty of people connected with the agency, McNihil included, believed the notion went back to the actual, nonmythologized frontier of the American West-or even farther, to the first societies to domesticate and herd animals.

• The principle being that if the valuable property was widely dispersed-as with cattle across grazing land, or intellectual property digitized on the wire-and therefore easier to steal, the antitheft forces had to amp up the consequences for theft: death to rustlers and horse thieves, trophy-ization for copyright infringers.

• Draconian measures have something of a life of their own. Plus, the Collection Agency had its own public- relations wing, to make sure that the fate of trophies was broadcast as widely as possible, to make sure that anyone contemplating a little info-larceny would know what would happen to them if they got caught. If you wanted to spend the rest of your life-a long life-as a toaster, it could be arranged.

• A certain immortality could be achieved, though nothing that anyone would want. Self-destruction has its seductive elements, but this was something else again. Purged of the grosser elements of the human body, the essential brain tissue, and the consciousness and personality locked inside the soft wiring, could last decades, perhaps centuries-only a few of the earliest trophies had crapped out in the field. The agency’s packaging, the cellular life-support technology contained in the cable sheathing and the little sealed boxes inside the toasters, was designed for low maintenance and an indefinite run.

• Thus, into the economy inside people’s heads, that private assessment of potential risks and benefits, the element of catastrophic price was introduced. Price beyond death, beyond the notions of desirability for even the terminally self-destructive.

• Nobel prizes in economics had been handed out in the twentieth century for deep thinkers who’d figured out with charts and graphs what cops had known for millennia: people, weighing a course of action, factor in the consequences of success or failure as well as the chances. Amp-up the negative consequences high enough, and you can scare a lot of little bastards from connecting around.

• In that sense, the Collection Agency dealt in sanctioned terrorism. The agency didn’t have a problem with that.

I don’t have a problem with that, McNihil told himself. He pulled the probe tips loose from the cable’s readout sockets, wrapped the wires around the meter, and dropped it back into his pocket. Glancing over his shoulder at Turbiner, he saw the old man still absorbed by the music, the third movement dancing ominously to its close. Turbiner looked drowned, as though the audible tide had taken him down to its depths, the strands of his silver hair drifting like seaweed. Those are pearls that were his eyes- McNihil stood up but didn’t move away from the equipment rack and its glowing power tubes, as though cautious of breaking the spell.

All through the Gloss, in their scrappy or plush flats or other living-spaces, old writers like Alex Turbiner, and composers and musicians, artists and programmers, symbolic manipulators all-they were listening to their bloodily