The Eternal Prison (14 page)

 

“Alcatraz tradition,” she’d explained. “I don’t know where it comes from, but when I was penned up there a few years ago, that’s what they gave anyone in for murder. Murder a cop, you got a crown on the skull.”

 

Skinner had been getting around. If you were sensitive you’d say she was hooking, selling off sexual favors in return for whatever she needed that day. I got the feeling, though, that Marlena just liked sex, and getting something in return was incidental, something she did when she thought about it. I was turning out to be the only one she spent the night with, though. I liked her. She didn’t take any shit, and I’d never known anyone more comfortable in their skin. Just looking at her and you relaxed, felt normal.

 

It never got quiet. We didn’t have a lights-out—there were no lights—or a curfew. Half the people I’d arrived with were gone, and I had no clue how it happened. I would suddenly realize that I hadn’t seen a face for a while, and that was it: they were gone. Before they got vaporized or whatever, they were free to do whatever they pleased at night, which mostly meant gambling. Everyone had something they’d managed to smuggle in or take from someone else. I had six shivs already, taken from people who’d tried to stick them into my guts—my only possessions. Others had mysteriously brought dice or knives or cigarettes. One good-looking kid with perfect skin had brought his credit dongle, like a talisman. After he’d been beaten into a coma and left out in the sun for a few hours, it had been passed around, amusing everyone to discover that he had fifteen thousand yen in his account, enough for a good meal or maybe a haircut.

 

He’d been gone the next day, as mysteriously as everyone else.

 

“You ever know your father?” I’d asked once, surprising myself.

 

“No,” she’d said immediately. “Mother, either.”

 

Above the usual hushed murmur of games, fights, and conversations all around, I heard the unmistakable rhythm of a confrontation. I ignored it at first, two tight voices hissing like snakes and weaving in and out of the other sounds, two more assholes impatient to get wherever Chengara was taking them. Then I heard one word in another voice, impossible to catch but the voice was clear enough: an older woman’s voice, uneven but the syllable bitten off fiercely.

 

I sat up, Marlena sliding down from my shoulder and grunting. I listened for a moment, but it was just the first two voices again, jumping all over each other.

 

Swinging my feet onto the still-warm floor of the dorm, I eased up off the cot and stepped as lightly as I could toward the voices. My leg throbbed suddenly, making me hitch as I walked. The old woman was sitting at the same table I’d seen her at before, still painfully straight, her hands clasped tightly in front of her. A touch of bright red had come to her old, dry cheeks, but she sat perfectly still, her eyes flashing from one of the men leaning over her to the other in rhythmic, mechanical ticks.

 

“C’mon, ya hag,” the one on the left growled.

 

“Give it or we cut it off,” the one on the right finished.

 

She pulled the coat tighter around her. I’d never seen her take it off, despite the soul-crushing heat. Her friends weren’t anything special—two kids, teenagers, shaved heads growing in, scars on their arms, and deep curves to their spines. Clouds of kids like that had infested New York at one time, and you had to swat them off you like flies.

 

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” the one on the left hissed. “It’s just a fucking coat!”

 

I cleared my throat. “You all right, lady?”

 

“Who the fuck —” the one on the left started to bark, twisting around. He stopped when he saw me, his right eye sagging under a thick yellow scar. His friend turned, and for a moment they both stared at me.

 

“Uh,” the one on the left said, blinking, his whole face twitching. “This ain’t your worries.”

 

The other one just stood there mute, mouth hanging open.

 

I had one of my confiscated knives palmed and crossed my arms to keep it obscured. I looked at the woman. She stared back at me, her hands still clutching the damn coat tightly to her throat. “I worry about a lot of things. The worries of the world keep me awake at nights.” I shifted my eyes to look back at the two kids. “You want me to worry about you?”

 

They looked at each other, and then the one on the right closed his mouth, turning fully around to face me. For a second or two we studied each other. I had a foot or more on him, and I’d managed to eat better for the past two decades. He didn’t know I had the blade, but I’d already been forced to kill a few assholes since my arrival, and my name still had a certain weight to it, even to people who hadn’t lived in New York. It was painful to watch him think—and he was clearly the brains of the operation.

 

Still, I was on the balls of my feet, ignoring the pain in my leg, my wrists and elbows loose and ready. We were all People of Interest. Even Slackjaw here was in for a reason. I didn’t want to find out his reason was because he could pop blood vessels from fifty feet away with his mind; people had always made the mistake of thinking Kev Gatz was a harmless idiot, and that had turned out wrong—at least the
harmless
part.

 

“No, Cates,” he finally said in a marble-mouthed mumble. “No.” He started forward, then paused to tug forcefully at his friend’s arm. They both launched into motion, moving rapidly past me. I turned my head enough to keep track of them until they were swallowed by the gloom, and then I looked back at her.

 

“You okay?”

 

Her eyes squinted up a little, making her already stern face almost fierce. “Do Gunners with over seventy confirmed murders—at least thirty-seven of them officers of the System Security Force—normally make a habit of saving old women from thugs? Or is being in a penitentiary a tonic of sorts for worthless scum?”

 

I put one eyebrow up, racking my brain to try and remember where I knew her face. “I save one old woman for every ten people murdered.” I shifted my weight to try and ease off the dull ache in my leg. It didn’t work. “And your numbers are a little out-of-date, lady.”

 

She nodded. “It’s been a while since I’ve had access to SSF dossiers.” She leaned back a little, letting go of her coat and folding her papery hands on top of the table. “Last time I saw yours was when Marin was pushing his little Squalor project and plumped you as a candidate.”

 

A memory clicked into place. I pointed at her. “You’re an Undersecretary.” I reconsidered. “
Were
an Undersecretary.”

 

She nodded, her face impassive. “Dolores Salgado,” she said crisply. “And I
was
Undersecretary for the Australian Department.” She shrugged and busied herself lighting a cigarette. “I happened to be in Baltimore when the tricky bastard made his move, and I got caught up in the sweep.”

 

“His move?” I stepped over the bench and sat down across from her.

 

“Marin. Your patron.” She looked down at the table. “Worst decision we ever made, raising that half-dead simp from his hospital bed to the directorship.” Her eyes jumped back onto mine, startling, so alive and energetic in the midst of that tired, thin face. “I can still see him, dark and pudgy, broken. Harmless!”

 

I tried to imagine Dick Marin as
dark and pudgy,
and couldn’t.

 

“But we wanted to test the technology, of course.” Her smile was hollow. “He turned out to be smarter than we suspected, eh? First the state of emergency you helped him engineer. His programmed limits lifted, just like that. But he has no budgetary control, we told ourselves. We starved him of funds and poured everything into our shiny new army. Thirty years without a standing army, Mr. Cates, and now we have a
huge
one, ready to move. But Marin’s still smarter than us. They told us that being digitized in no way altered your natural intelligence or abilities, but I think Director Marin is proving us all wrong.”

 

I scratched my leg absently, trying to push down hard enough to get at the never-ending ache. “I had a friend once, got turned into a Monk. Not the same thing, but he said it… clarified him.”

 

She squinted and ticked her head. “Yes, perhaps.
Clarified.
I like it. Perhaps Marin was clarified. At any rate, he has moved first—thrown the weight of his police against us, without warning. It’s a civil war, Mr. Cates.”

 

I nodded. Even in here, this was old news, brought in stutteringly by the new arrivals every day. “What do you know about Ruberto? Your counterpart?” He was the only other Undersecretary I knew by name, I realized. Ruberto had authorized a government Spook—a psionic—named Bendix and a team of Stormers to come snatch me up in Paris during the Plague, a lifetime ago.

 

Tilting her head, Salgado smoothed her coat, studying it apparently for lint. “Not much before his inexplicable rise. He doesn’t have much history. He wasn’t an original Undersecretary—his career’s been guided by powerful friends. He came to significance shortly after we elevated Marin, springing up like a weed in Chicago.” She shrugged, returning her eyes to me. “Aside from sharing a title with him, I don’t have much in common with or opinion of Mr. Ruberto. He is, however, the power broker of the Undersecretaries at the moment. He will no doubt be a very powerful figure in the new army, and the New Order it ushers in.” She sighed, but it was theatrical and there was nothing sad or wistful about it. “I am afraid, Mr. Cates, that the System as we knew it is now a memory, and something new will be taking its place.”

 

I gave her a small smile. “I’m not afraid of that at all.” I kept the smile simmering in place. “Why are you here, then?”

 

Her face remained blank, but she lifted one skinny arm and tapped her head. “The same reason we are all here, Mr. Cates. Though I suspect even Director Marin does not know what a treasure
my
brain will prove to him.” She looked down at her lap and sighed again, and this time I thought it felt real. “I wish I were brave. I could cheat him.” She looked back up at me. “But I am not brave.”

 

I studied her. I liked her calmness, her poise. “I could do you a service,” I said steadily, keeping my eyes on hers. “If you want.” I shrugged. “I’ve got nothing but time here. And it’s what I do.”

 

Movement made me turn, startled, and I found Bartlett, bare chested as always and gleaming with a million fresh scars on his massive chest, standing just a few feet away. He looked like he was glaring angrily at us, but he always looked that way and I didn’t pay him much attention. He and Salgado exchanged a stare, and after a moment he snorted and walked off.

 

“You know him?” I asked.

 

She nodded. “I know every cop ever detailed to me. Espin Bartlett, Captain, originally Detroit until Detroit got shut down and evacced. A hothead, but a good man. He was on my bodyguard detail for three years some time back. Before the SSF decided it had better things to do than keep Undersecretaries alive.” She shook her head. “Espin’s had a hard time these past few weeks.”

 

I considered. She sounded almost motherly. I remembered her from the Vids—always painfully erect, those eyes glaring at you from the screen. “You’ve got to be more valuable to Marin than some of the shit kickers we have here. Why let you rattle around here?”

 

She shrugged. “Marin is still bound by his limitations, Mr. Cates. He’s one man—or one intelligence, I suppose, is more accurate—processing the data streams of hundreds of avatars, not to mention the snail streams of his assistants and secretaries. It’s a volume of information the human mind was never designed to handle, and even if he is operating on clockspeeds, now he’s slow and sloppy.” She shrugged again, putting her cigarette into her mouth and taking a deep drag. “They are pulling tens of thousands of people through facilities like this. He just hasn’t noticed me yet. By the time he does, I’ll probably have been sucked through here and processed, so no harm done, yes?”

 

She smiled, and at first I thought she was laughing, her face reddening. Then I realized she was coughing. I watched her without moving, and she waved her bony hands at me.

 

“Damn,” she panted, cigarette wobbling up and down between her lips. “A hundred and seven and I’m on my fourth lung. I may cheat Marin after all!”

 

“What do you mean, processed?”

 

She was gasping like a fish, but stole little nips of smoke in between. “Mr. Cates, I have a favor to ask you. I’ve read your file. You’re a man of honor, in your way.”

 

I shook my head again. “You’re thinking of someone else, mother. Someone who didn’t make it through the Plague.”

 

Her eyes stayed on me. I didn’t like it and struggled not to let it show. “I’m nearly dead, and high time,” she said. “I’ve done what I could to… never mind my ridiculous justifications. I am a corpse. My brain and heart just haven’t figured it out yet. I’m too cowardly to just end it, so I’m taking my chances here and hoping I keel over before they process me.”

 

Process.
I didn’t like the word. Monks had been processed.

 

“I hear you’re getting out, you and the Freak Show—the Little Man and his Freaks, yes?”

 

All of my attention narrowed down to her for a moment. There were no secrets in prison, of course, but this bothered me for some reason. That
she
would know about it, with her voice so used to command it just oozed out of her, her eyes sharp and disappointed eternally. I decided not to say anything, but she nodded and looked down as if I had and she was satisfied.

 

“I’d like you to take Espin with you,” she said.

 

I blinked. “The
cop?
” I blurted, and then to try and sound semi-intelligent, I added, “Not you?”

 

She crushed the cigarette out on the table and stood up laboriously, her breathing ragged and rapid. “I am a dead woman, Mr. Cates. Though I may,” she said with a sudden smile that made her look impish and feminine for a second, “live on in this hellhole, yes? Perhaps.” She winked. “If so, look me up someday, Mr. Cates. I may be of some use to you.” She turned and walked slowly away. “I feel I owe Espin a debt, Mr. Cates, and this is my only chance to offer him something. You can trust him, Mr. Cates. You have my assurance on that.”