The Eternal Prison (8 page)

 

“What can I do for you, Michaleen?”

 

“Oh,” he sputtered. “What can you do for me, you murderous bastard. Why, you can help me break out of this shithole. That’s what you can do for me.”

 

 

 

 

V

HARD PEOPLE DOING A HARD JOB

 

 

 

 

I awoke suddenly, opening my eyes and completely online in a split second. It was always like that now; I’d never been a heavy sleeper—heavy sleepers woke up with empty pockets and slit throats—but now I lit up from a complete blackout kind of slumber like a switch had been flicked. I’d gotten paranoid back in prison, where I’d been a pretty popular target, but I didn’t think I’d ever get used to it.

 

“Welcome back to the land of the living,” I heard Ruberto say. “Did I tell you this guy could sleep? If I had that much blood on my hands, I would lie awake screaming all night. Mr. Cates shuts down like he doesn’t have a worry in his head.”

 

I blinked around. I was sitting in a comfortable leather seat that spun silently in response to any shift in weight. As I was turned around, I saw I was in a sumptuous hover cabin done up to resemble a luxurious hotel room—wood paneling on the walls, expensive furniture bolted into place, low music in the air. When the two men came into my view, I stared at them stupidly for a few seconds before I recognized Ruberto, sitting plump and primped in a beautiful pink suit behind a tiny built-in desk, his fucking lady hands still moving in silent, complex patterns over his work space.

 

The other man I’d never seen before. He was deeply tan, with shiny black hair cropped close to his head except for the top, which flopped around in an uneven wave. He was tall, too, uncomfortably squeezed into the seat, his legs stretched out as far as he could get them. His suit was dark blue and just as snazzy, a few ten thousand yen of fabric on his back shimmering in the light, and he wore several gold rings on his long, slow-looking fingers. He had a familiar young-old look about him, and piercing, unblinking eyes that were familiar to me. A psionic, I decided. I’d seen enough of them to know, and they all worked for the civilian government—the Spooks. For a moment we sat and stared at each other.

 

“Maybe he cries himself to sleep,” the psionic said.

 

I smiled. “I cried, once. Didn’t enjoy it.”

 

This earned me a smirk, which I also didn’t like much.

 

“We are currently over Ohio,” Ruberto said distractedly, not looking up. “We will be near New York City in about half an hour.” He looked up at me from under his eyebrows. “Can’t get you too close, unfortunately. Director Marin
owns
New York, and we won’t get into its airspace without an incident. Neely, give our boy the rundown.”

 

Neely and I looked at each other again. I didn’t recall agreeing to the job, but of course, I had: I’d been hoping to have a shot at Dick Marin for years. Problem was, most of the Dick Marins you ran into on the street were avatars, Droids with digital brains, controlled like smart puppets from diverse locations. I didn’t even know if there was a real, human Richard Marin left or if he was totally digital. You could kill hundreds of Marins and he’d still be there, like mold.

 

“This is the guy?” Neely said, staring at me. “He looks like a fucking slug, boss.”

 

Ruberto smiled down at his desk. “Play nice, please.”

 

Neely shrugged, arching his thick black eyebrows. The hum of the hover was lulling, a steady rhythm that tugged at you. “Okay,” he said, turning back to me. “Marin
is
the cops, right?

 

I mean, we don’t have anything against the System Security Force—good people, just about every one of them.”

 

I smiled wide. “Speak for yourself,” I advised.

 

“Hard people doing a hard job,” Ruberto murmured softly, like he was cooing to his lap desk.

 

Neely spread his huge, supple hands, the sort of hands that would be good at strangling you. “It’s Marin. He’s the poison. He’s the problem here. He’s fucking power mad—excuse my language, boss.”

 

Ruberto nodded absently.

 

“He thinks he got elected mayor of the whole fucking System,” Neely went on, shooting his cuffs and shrugging his shoulders inside his expensive suit. “Cut that motherfucker’s head off, and the cops go back to just bein’ cops, right? Sorry again, boss.”

 

I leaned forward, putting my elbows on my knees. “You can’t kill Marin,” I said slowly. “You kill him, three more crawl out of the shadows to shoot at you.”

 

Ruberto chuckled, but Neely just gave me those blank eyes. “Right, if you go after the fucking avatars like an asshole.” He leaned over to his side and extracted a sheet of shiny electric paper from a thin briefcase. He handed it over to me, the sheet catching the light and reflecting a shimmering silver back at me. As I took it in my numb hands, it made a metallic, flexible noise, the print blurring and refreshing at odd angles. I snapped it back into shape but didn’t look at it, keeping my attention on Neely, who was the sort of guy who lunged at you when you were distracted.

 

“You need to go after the Prime,” he said, nodding at the sheet. “Kill the Prime, and every fucking avatar on the streets of the System will hit the bricks.”

 

“Problem solved,” Ruberto said, nodding his head slightly.

 

“The avatars have a complete template of the controlling intelligence, of course,” Neely said. “But they don’t have any kind of real-time backup—they’re flat templates. Snapshots. Everything gets fed back to the Prime, and the Prime issues all the commands. The avatars can function on their own, of course, but without the Prime there is no coordination. You’d suddenly have a thousand Director Marins scattered everywhere, little puddles of authority.”

 

“Chaos,” Ruberto murmured.

 

“Anarchy,” Neely echoed.

 

I glanced down at the sheet, flipping through the specifications quickly with curt gestures. “Why can’t you go after the Prime remotely? Hack it?”

 

“Independent network,” Ruberto muttered, hands moving delicately.

 

“Independent network,” Neely echoed, spreading his hands, jewelry flashing. “Dedicated infrastructure; unique handshakes and encryption; heavy-duty, rolling security. The rest of the System could go dark, and Marins would still be running around. Marin doesn’t share bandwidth. You have to take out the Prime.” He leaned back. “Take out the Prime, and the SSF is headless.”

 

“Order is restored,” Ruberto said quietly.

 

“Problem solved,” Neely finished.

 

We all sat there in silence for a moment. I flipped through the specs again. “This Prime unit is in Moscow. Fucking
Russia?
” I was never going to be free of the Ivans.

 

Neely nodded. “Fucking Moscow. SSF HQ is New York; Marin decided it was best if Internal Affairs was headquartered as far away as possible. The Kremlin was fortified during Unification; it’s as tough a nut to crack as you’ll find, so he settled in there, when he’s not on the move.”

 

“A man after my own heart,” Ruberto muttered.

 

My eyes kept sweeping the sheet. “That’s a huge storage and UPS. I’ve never seen an uninterrupted power supply that heavy.”

 

“The Prime is not mobile,” Neely said immediately. “Its hardware demands keep it stationary.”

 

I nodded and looked back at them. Ruberto was smiling and nodding his round head a little, as if something on his desktop amused him a great deal. Neely had his dark little eyes locked on me, those brutal hands steepled in front of him. Fucking government. They all thought they were civilization itself, salvation in human form—the cops, the Undersecretaries, and now their fucking flunkies the Spooks. They were all just gangsters.

 

“How do I kill the Prime, then?”

 

Neely gave me a flat, unimpressed stare. “You can’t just waltz in, put a bullet into some black box, and that’s it. The Prime is a fucking complex, it’s a building unto itself, several floors below ground. Server banks, big pieces of tech. Generators, signal boosters, an army of Techies. The Prime
is
Moscow, practically. There’s, of course, ancillary security.” He shrugged. “In the form of his Worms, the Internal Affairs elite officers. The
Worms.
”

 

“Also avatars,” Ruberto said softly.

 

“Also avatars,” Neely agreed without expression, his dead eyes staring at me. I stared back for a moment, the words hanging there between us.

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“That’s what Marin’s doing. That’s what this is all
about,
” Ruberto said, his eyes popping open while the rest of him remained perfectly still. Around us, the whine of displacement shifted down a bit, which meant we were near our destination. “That fucking insane dictator is making the System Security Force into an army of avatars—digital intelligences ripped right out of the brains of real, actual cops. He can mass-produce copies, each one with all the skills and memories of the original. Plus —”

 

“Programming,” Neely said.

 

“Programming,” Ruberto echoed. “They’re like the original cops—look the same, act the same—but the fucking maniac can insert instructions into their templates. So not only are his cops—his fucking
army
of cops—inexhaustible and replaceable, but he can
control
them.”

 

“This is what the prick’s doing,” Neely interjected.

 

“We estimate that about half the force has so far been transformed,” Ruberto said, suddenly standing up, his plump little body almost bouncing as he began to pace, his hands pushed deep into his pockets. “This is what we’re
fighting
against. He has displayed bad faith.”

 

Neely stared at me for a moment, silent. I looked around, knowing this was not going to end well for me. They weren’t going to send any of their own into the saw blade—why not send Cates? We keep throwing him into the fire, and he somehow crawls out.

 

“So the Prime is the installation,” I said slowly, feeling my way through it. “It’s not just a single fancy avatar. It’s the whole fucking—what, building? City block?
City?
” Silently, I fervently hoped they did not tell me Marin’s Prime was an entire fucking city.

 

“The Kremlin,” Ruberto said, sounding distracted as he paced. “The whole building,” Neely offered. “Whole thing has to be fucking nuked to take him out.”

 

“We’re launching an offensive to take Moscow,” Ruberto said briskly, returning to his seat. “The general staff is not optimistic. Moscow’s defenses are extensive, and it’s historically been a tough nut to crack.”

 

I took his word for that.

 

“So you’re insurance,” Neely finished. “We’ll try to get in, bomb the fucking place to hell. In case we can’t, you go in, tear him down local.”

 

It was curious, how stupid they thought I was. “And if I’m sitting there with my thumb up my ass when you break through the lines and start bombing?”

 

“You are being
compensated,
” Ruberto said, sounding exasperated. They always thought it was all about yen.

 

Neely smiled as if it were all settled. “Marin’s in the process of converting his cops into
avatars,
” he said. “It’s not complete yet. He’s started with the street cops and now he’s moving into the upper ranks—and he hasn’t touched the Technical Associates at all. He’s worried.”

 

“The spark,” Ruberto said, standing up.

 

“Whatever,” Neely said, sitting forward and clasping his hands in front of himself. “He’s moving slow, being careful. This guy, name’s Gall”—he reached over and tapped the sheet of paper, making it shimmer—“is in charge of Marin’s Kremlin security. Internal Affairs, old-school, one of Marin’s original recruits. Draws a lot of water, gets a lot of leeway from Marin, and pretty much does what he wants. He gets around, has his fingers in a lot of pies, most illegal, but Marin gives him a pass. You name it, this bastard does it: protection schemes —”

 

“Large scale,” Ruberto said, pacing.

 

“On a
huge
scale. Political favors, fuck, he even bodyguards VIPs for a million yen a week. This guy directs all Kremlin security. Get to him. That’s step one. Get to him before Marin tin cans him, and you’ll know everything there is to know about the security situation.”

 

I studied the digipaper for a moment. A big-shot Worm, all right, living the high life. Not easy work. I snapped the sheet again and the data flowed up from the bottom, his public SSF record—more fucking redactions than text—a grainy old picture that almost looked pre-Unification.

 

“You in, Cates?” Neely spread his big hands, each finger like a limb of its own. “I know you suffered terribly in prison, ass-rape and silent, private tears and all that shit. You don’t have the nerve for this, just say so.”

 

Ruberto crossed over to stand behind Neely and put a hand on the sitting man’s shoulder. “Trust me, Neely, this man has done amazing, terrible things. This is our man.”

 

I looked up at the fat Undersecretary, numb and feeling one of my fuzzy moments coming on like glue filling my head. “Why are we going to New York if my mark’s in Moscow?”