In the silence after he’d hung up, Adam recalled something that Carlos had said to the old man, back in New York one sweltering July, taking him aside in the middle of the haggling over a secondhand air-conditioner they were attempting to buy. “You’re a good person, cariño, so you don’t see it when people are trying to cheat you.” Maybe he’d been sincere, or maybe “good” had just been a tactful euphemism for “unworldly,” though if the old man really had been so trusting, how had Adam ended up with the opposite trait? Was cynicism some kind of default, wired into the template from which the whole side-loading process had started?
Adam found an auditor with no connections to the old man’s lawyers, picking a city at random and then choosing the person with the highest reputation score with whom he could afford a ten-minute consultation. Her name was Lillian Adjani.
“Because these companies have no shareholders,” she explained, “there’s not that much that needs to be disclosed in their public filings. And I can’t just go to them myself and demand to see their financial records. A court could do that, in principle, and you might be able to find a lawyer who’d take your money to try to make that happen. But who would their client be?”
Adam had to admire the way she could meet his gaze with an expression of sympathy, while reminding him that—shorn of the very constructs he was trying to scrutinize—for administrative purposes he didn’t actually exist.
“So there’s nothing I can do?” Maybe he was starting to confuse his secondhand memories of the real world with all the shows he’d been watching, where people just followed the money trail. The police never seemed to need to get the courts involved, and even civilians usually had some supernaturally gifted hacker at their disposal. “We couldn’t … hire an investigator … who could persuade someone to leak … ?” Mike Ehrmantraut would have found a way to make it happen in three days flat.
Ms. Adjani regarded him censoriously. “I’m not getting involved in anything illegal. But maybe you have something yourself, already in your possession, that could help you more than you realize.”
“Like what?”
“How computer-savvy was your … predecessor?”
“He could use a word processor and a web browser. And Skype.”
“Do you still have any of his devices?”
Adam laughed. “I don’t know what happened to his phone, but I’m talking to you from his laptop right now.”
“Okay. Don’t get your hopes too high, but if there were files containing financial records or legal documents that he received and then deleted, then unless he went out of his way to erase them securely, they might still be recoverable.”
Ms. Adjani sent him a link for a piece of software she trusted to do the job. Adam installed it, then stared numbly at the catalog of eighty-three thousand “intelligible fragments” that had shown up on the drive.
He started playing with the filtering options. When he chose “text,” portions of scripts began emerging from the fog—some instantly recognizable, some probably abandoned dead-ends. Adam averted his gaze, afraid of absorbing them into his subconscious if they weren’t already buried there. He had to draw a line somewhere.
He found an option called “financial,” and when that yielded a blizzard of utility bills, he added all the relevant keywords he could think of.
There were bills from the lawyers, and bills from Loadstone. If Gina was screwing him, she’d been screwing the old man as well, because the hourly rate hadn’t changed. Adam was beginning to feel foolish; he was right to be vigilant about his precarious situation, but if he let that devolve into fullblown paranoia he’d just end up kicking all the support structures out from beneath his feet.
Loadstone hadn’t been shy with their fees either. Adam hadn’t known before just how much his body had cost, but given the generally excellent engineering it was difficult to begrudge the expense. There was an item for the purchase of the template, and then one for every side-loading session, broken down into various components. “Squid operator?” he muttered, bemused. “What the fuck?” But he wasn’t going to start convincing himself that they’d blinded the old man with technobabble. He’d paid what he’d paid, and in the hospital he’d given Adam every indication that he’d been happy with the result.
“Targeted occlusions?” Meaning blood clots in the brain? The old man had left him login details allowing him postmortem access to all his medical records; Adam checked, and there had been no clots.
He searched the web for the phrase in the context of side-loading. The pithiest translation he found was: “The selective non-transferal of a prescribed class of memories or traits.”
Which meant that the old man had held something back, deliberately. Adam was an imperfect copy of him, not just because the technology was imperfect, but because he’d wanted it that way.
“You lying piece of shit.” Toward the end, the old man had rambled on about his hope that Adam would outdo his own achievements, but judging from his efforts so far he wasn’t even going to come close. Three attempts at new scripts had ended up dead in the water. It wasn’t Ryan and his family who’d robbed him of the most valuable part of the inheritance.
Adam sat staring at his hands, contemplating the possibilities for a life worth living without the only skill the old man had ever possessed. He remembered joking to Carlos once that they should both train as doctors and go open a free clinic in San Salvador. “When we’re rich.” But Adam doubted that his original, let alone the diminished version, was smart enough to learn to do much more than empty bedpans.
He switched off the laptop and walked into the master bedroom. All of the old man’s clothes were still there, as if he’d fully expected them to be used again. Adam took off his own clothes and began trying on each item in turn, counting the ones he
