Realms of Light (13 page)

“Ah, I see. Interesting.”

“I hope you can help me.”

“I? But Mis’ Hsing, assuming the data on the
ship’s systems is accurate, I was recorded almost four years ago.
How could I know anything about events that took place just a few
days ago?”

“Other than what’s on the nets, you can’t,” I
admitted. “But you presumably know what’s in the ITEOD files
besides yourself, and why you, or rather the original Yoshio
Nakada, put it there. That might be useful.”

“I suppose it might, at that,” it said. “I
confess I don’t see how, but I don’t know the details of your
investigation.”

“Someone used a high-level Nakada Enterprises
account to copy the ITEOD files,” I told it. “I don’t know who or
what they were after, but if I knew what’s in there, I might be
able to guess.”

“Someone on Epimetheus?”

“Yes.”

“Is Vijay Vo still—yes, from the accounts of
my death I see that he is. What about little Sayuri? My
great-granddaughter—do you know her?”

“I know her,” I said. “She went back to
Prometheus a year ago.”

“Does that definitively rule her out?”

“No,” I admitted. “But it does make her very
unlikely.”

“Did someone take her place?”

“I believe Mis’ Vo assumed her duties. If you
will excuse me, I think this might go faster if you simply told me
what’s in the files.”

“You saw the accounts.”

“And the genealogies, and the rest of the
standard wares. It’s the big numbered files that look like people
that I want to know about—those, and whatever was in the portion I
didn’t manage to download completely. One of those big files was
you. Are the others additional iterations of Yoshio Nakada?”

“Good heavens, no! Whenever I backed myself
up—or rather, whenever my original created a back-up, he erased the
previous version. It wouldn’t do to have multiple versions of me
around.”

That last sentence seemed to slow down as the
intelligence spoke, as it sank in just what it was saying. There
were
multiple versions of the old man. There were at least
two, and since I wasn’t the only one who copied the ITEOD files
there might be more.

“It’s not clear to me why there are
any
back-ups,” I said. “You’re too smart to think of it as
immortality.”

“Oh, it could be considered immortality of a
sort. I’m not the true Yoshio Nakada, but I’m his intellectual
descendent, just as much as the five children he sired, or their
offspring.”

“That’s not why he did it.”

“No, it’s not. He thought some of our
knowledge and wisdom might be of use to his heirs. In fact, the
possibility of assisting in the investigation of his death had
occurred to me... to him, and here I am.”

“But just you, no other iterations of Yoshio
Nakada.”

“Just me, unless he changed policy and
recorded one after me. From what I can see, if he did that he also
altered the dates and deliberately disguised it as one of the other
files that was already here.”

“Or it might be in the seven percent I
missed,” I said. “But I agree it doesn’t seem likely. So what
is
in those files?”

“Really, Mis’ Hsing, I’m surprised you
haven’t guessed.”

“I haven’t. I’m obviously a moron deserving
your contempt. Take pity on me and tell me.”

“You aren’t a moron, Mis’ Hsing. I suppose
you just don’t think the way I do.”

I suppressed several choice responses to
that.

“It’s simple enough,” the copy continued.
“They’re my family.”

I considered that for a moment before I spoke.

“What family?” I asked. “It’s not the entire
Nakada clan—that’s a couple of hundred people, and there aren’t
that many in there.”

“No, not the entire clan,” it agreed. “Just
some of the key personnel of Nakada Enterprises who agreed to be
recorded, but are still alive.”

“Still alive? What about the dead ones?”

“Oh, when anyone I had recorded died, I would
assess the situation, and either activate the recording and
transfer it back to the secure household systems on Prometheus, or
erase it.”

“Activate it? So there are some human-based
uploads living in the household systems?”

“Oh, yes. There were eight when I was
recorded myself.”

I grimaced. “It might have been useful if the
old man had
told
me that! He said there were AIs in the
household net, but he never said any of them used to be human.”

“It’s not public knowledge.”

“I’m not the public; I’m his employee. I
can’t do my job properly if I don’t have all the relevant
information.”

“You think it’s relevant?”

“I don’t
know
if it’s relevant, but it
might be.”

“You prefer to have as much information as
possible, I see.”

“Yes. In my line of work I can rarely tell
what’s going to matter and what isn’t until I’ve learned everything
I can.”

“Obviously, I can’t literally tell you
everything I know—your brain doesn’t have room, even with your
symbiote and other peripherals. I’ll answer your questions, though,
and perhaps if I knew more about the exact nature of the
assassination attempt, I could be more useful to you.”

“Maybe you could,” I agreed, and I told it
about the dream enhancer and the euthanasia virus, and everything
else I could remember of the old man’s words. Which, since I had my
implants working properly and had recorded the encounter, was all
of them.

It considered this carefully, then said,
“I... he did not actually lie. He said it could be a member of the
family, or one of their AIs. He merely neglected to mention that
eight individuals fall into both those categories. You failed to
ask for a complete roster.”

“He was supposed to be volunteering
information, not avoiding it.”

“Secrecy is a hard habit to break, Mis’
Hsing.”

“Yeah. So I’ve heard. All eight of those
people would know what’s in the death files here in Nightside City,
wouldn’t they?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Would the other AIs? Or the living members
of the family?”

“Ah. Some would, some wouldn’t. Any specifics
I might give could be out of date.”

“They’d be better than nothing,” I told it.
“Tell me about your family, human or AI.”

It told me. It took awhile.

I had already seen the official genealogy, as
I’ve said before, but that didn’t mention any recordings, and
apparently some members of the family weren’t necessarily living
where the official reports said they were.

As of the day the old man had recorded
himself, the family compound on Prometheus was home to sixteen
living members of the Nakada clan, counting Yoshio, and eight AIs
that had started out as copies of human brains. Nine of the sixteen
had been recorded, and those recordings were in the ITEOD files.
Vijay Vo had also been included, as had Narumi Desai, Yoshio’s
niece—it seemed she maintained legal residence on Earth, but
traveled a lot, and had spent some time the Eta Cassiopeia system a
few years back.

There were dozens of others Nakadas scattered
through human space, but it wasn’t clear how any of them could have
been responsible for tampering with the dream enhancer. On the
other hand, after arbitrarily assuming that the old man wasn’t
suicidal, that left twenty-three suspects living in the family
compound without even counting the staff.

That staff included a varying number of
humans, typically half a dozen, and at least three AIs, so
altogether I had more than thirty possibilities to work with. That
was too damn many.

I hadn’t really intended to seriously
investigate this yet; I wasn’t even on the right planet. I had come
to Epimetheus to collect my brother and father as the down-payment
on my fee, not to start looking for the assassin. If ’Chan hadn’t
mentioned that everyone here thought Grandfather Nakada was dead, I
told myself, I wouldn’t have been doing any of this. I wouldn’t be
talking to a simulacrum of the old man. I wouldn’t have recordings
of almost a dozen other people I could interrogate, if I wanted
to.

But then I remembered the newsies hovering
outside the ship, and I realized that I
would
have been
investigating, in any case. ’Chan had been the first to mention it,
but I would have found out about Yoshio’s phony death soon
enough.

And if the would-be assassin was one of those
thirty-odd intelligences in the Nakada compound back on Prometheus,
who had faked the death reports here in Nightside City? Had that
been the same person, taking command of reports going out from
Prometheus, or had it been someone on this end, controlling
incoming news? I had thought it had to be someone on Epimetheus,
since there hadn’t been any news about his death back on
Prometheus, but that would mean I was dealing with two people,
rather than one...

Or would it? Could the assassin have planted
the virus in the dream enhancer, then immediately left for
Prometheus, and been here in time to spread the word of the old
man’s death?

“
Ukiba
,” I said, “I want the traffic
reports for the Nightside City port, dating back, oh, let’s say
four hundred hours.”

The ship gave me the list. It didn’t help;
with the tourist traffic coming to Nightside City to watch the
sunlight scroll down the crater wall, there were half a dozen ships
my theoretical target could have been on. There weren’t any Nakada
Enterprises ships or private yachts to worry about other than the
Ukiba
itself, but that didn’t mean anything.

I might be after one person, or an entire
conspiracy, and if it
was
only one person, she might be
human or might be artificial. What’s more, she could be anywhere in
the Eta Cass system. There was no reason to think she was still in
Nightside City, assuming she had been here at all. She might well
have gotten what she was after and left.

But there
was
reason to think that the
assassination attempt had been carried out by one of the
inhabitants of the Nakada family compound in American City. If one
of those people had visited Nightside City immediately after the
incident, that would be... well, let’s just say it would arouse my
curiosity.

But I couldn’t just call and ask.
Interplanetary communications couldn’t be trusted. If I wanted to
investigate further I needed to go back to Prometheus.

I could do that, of course. I had the ship. I
had most of the ITEOD files, for whatever part they might have in
all this, and I had Yoshio-
kun
activated and cooperating. I
didn’t see anything else in Nightside City I really needed for my
investigation.

But I didn’t have my brother or my father,
and if I left them here to go back to Prometheus I might not have
another chance to get them out.

Well, I would just have to
get
them,
then. I knew where ’Chan was, and I could get him to the ship by
force if I had to.

Finding our father, though, wasn’t quite so
simple.

“You wouldn’t happen to know anything about
Seventh Heaven Neurosurgery, would you?” I asked the old man’s
upload.

“The dreamery? I considered buying it once—or
rather, the original Yoshio Nakada did.”

That was an interesting coincidence. Not a
tremendously unlikely one, given how many businesses the Nakada
clan scanned, but interesting. “But you—he didn’t?” I asked.

“The company’s long-term prospects were
poor,” the upload replied.

“Why?”

“Oh, come, Mis’ Hsing. Its entire operation
is in Nightside City.”

I couldn’t argue with that. Something
occurred to me, though. “Grandfather Nakada is two hundred and
forty years old. Why would you
care
about the long
term?”

“I may be old, Mis’ Hsing, but I am in no
hurry to die. Modern medicine can accomplish miracles, and is still
improving; I may... or rather, Yoshio Nakada may yet survive
another century or two.
I
, of course, may be around even
longer.”

“Yes, but...”

It hadn’t finished. “More importantly,” it
continued, before I could make my protest, “I care about my
family.”

That answered my question, so I clicked back
to the important subject. “So you didn’t buy it.”

“I did not, either in my human incarnation or
my present one, though of course I don’t know everything that’s
happened since I was recorded.”

“So you don’t have access to its
records.”

It did not respond immediately; then it said,
“I didn’t say that.”

That got my full attention. “Oh?”

“Naturally, when I was considering it as a
prospective acquisition, I thought it advisable to learn as much as
possible about the company.”

“You aren’t just talking about the public
records, are you?”

“Oh, it was possible to learn
far
more
than was in the public records!”

“You got into their private systems?”

“I was able to explore their records, yes. Or
rather, Yoshio Nakada explored them; I didn’t yet exist. I find it
intriguing to think that now, were I to access those records, I
would be ‘getting into them’ in a rather more literal way than in
my previous incarnation.”

“Could you do it again?”

“I don’t yet know, Mis’ Hsing. I paid an
employee of Seventh Heaven Neurosurgery to provide a back door into
their systems, and I have no way of knowing whether that back door
still exists.”

“Tell me about it.”

It told me.

“Mis’ Perkins,” I called, when
Yoshio-
kun
was done, “can we use the nets from the ship
unobserved?”

“No,” Perkins said. No hesitation, no
uncertainty, just “No.”

That was inconvenient. I didn’t want a bunch
of snoopers watching me break into Seventh Heaven’s files. If I did
it from the ship, they’d monitor the whole thing. If I left the
ship, they’d follow me. If
anyone
left the ship, the newsies
would follow her.