I took the case because I was out of money. It was not the sort of case a self-respecting private eye wants.
But I was desperate.
In these times, hardly anyone needs a private detective. After all, these are the days of miracle and wonder, when one’s own true love, even one’s simulacrum, so to speak, can be spun in a cocoon over on Wilson Boulevard by Nelson’s Artificial Person (fully licensed by whatever is left of the U.S. Government), and inculcated with any kind of physical and emotional frillery one fancies. Or thinks that one fancies.
Nanotechnology is, of course, a buzzword for “we can do anything.” I don’t understand exactly how an artificial person is grown, but each is a flesh and bone blank (many types and sizes in the catalogues), ready for final DNA tweaking and memory infusion. After the rash of memory-related Nobel prizes, competing memory preservation and replication techniques flooded the market, leading to the melding of many technologies. It was but a short jump to a development that has been both vaunted and abhorred: artificial people.
We are at a very odd place, you see. We are obviously “creating life,” and who could argue with that? Yet, people certainly have. Vast phalanxes of lawyers on both sides of the issues have made a lot of money lately, but the most they seem to be able to do is engage in skirmishes about some minute aspect of the various processes presently in use.
It is against the law to kill these beings, should they disappoint, although the penalties for doing so are minimal. It was this sort of instance that I was called upon to investigate.
I was hired by the artificial person’s sister.
She knocked on my office-door window on a Friday evening just after I had poured myself a Scotch. It was mid-December, gloomy at four-thirty PM, and that was evening enough to justify the first drink of the day. A light snow was falling, and the flakes outside my third-floor window glowed green, gold, and blue each time the Harry’s Bar sign just below changed color.
My office is in Rosslyn, Virginia, a few blocks from the Potomac River. Across Key Bridge is whatever was left of Washington, D.C. It had been utterly changed by a nanotech surge five years earlier.
We unchanged huddle here across the river. Many of the buildings here are altered, of course; new forms of communication are in full swing: giant beelike creatures fill the sky during the day, moving information here and there. Broadcast communication works only sporadically.
Almost everything else has changed.
But for me, on that day, nothing had changed. I had made sure of that. In fact, most days I entertained thoughts of cashing out completely, but even that seemed like too much trouble.
The woman cupped her hands to the glass in an attempt to see inside my dark office.
Illuminated by the dim bulb in the hallway, her face was pale, her eyes large and dark. Her hair was black. She wore a small, blue felt hat perched atop a sophisticated hairdo, with a net that swept across her eyes without hiding them. Her blue wool suit fit tightly; when she stepped back from the door, and looked doubtfully up and down the hall, I could see that her skirt was long and tight, with a little fillip at the bottom that gave her legs just enough room to take mincing steps. I knew that she wore high heels because I had heard them as she approached down the hall.
I decided that I wanted to see what they looked like.
I pushed my rumpled self up from my rumpled couch, tucked in my shirt, straightened my slightly stained tie. I am middle-aged, unable to afford—but not wanting, either—so many of the bionan enhancements at large in the world today. My looks are plain—a slightly heavy face, whiskers that grow too quickly, small blue eyes, a receding hairline, and a depressive personality that dulls whatever sparkle my mother might have seen in me. Like most private eyes, I used to be a police detective. For many years, I was quite successful. Most days, now, I sat in my office and wondered what I could do to make a living. I’d already put in a notice to the landlord that I was leaving at the end of the year. My office was cheap, but not cheap enough.
“Come in, the door’s open,” I called, as she turned to leave.
She looked startled, but turned the knob.
She reminded me of a giraffe—awkward in her tallness, her head bent forward slightly in a way that was calculated to be charming, diffident. Her brief smile did not reach her eyes.
“Hello. I’m looking for—a Mr. Mike Jones?” She looked around, clearly hoping to find a competent-looking detective—or at least a competent-looking receptionist—somewhere in the room.
“That’s me. Come in.” The shoes were black, open-toed slingbacks, strikingly inappropriate in this weather. She either had no sense, or couldn’t afford to buy new shoes—and therefore, couldn’t afford me.
I hoped that she had no sense.
“Come into my office.” I was torn, for a moment, between professionalism and need as I walked past the half-filled glass of Scotch still on the end table.
Need won. I picked it up. “I was almost ready to close. Can I pour you a drink?”
“No,” she said, with distaste and a bit of doubt.
I went to my desk and turned on my single desk lamp. She settled into one of the hard wooden chairs in front of my desk, and I sat behind it. She set her small black bag on my desk, which I took as a good sign. She did not remove her tight, gray leather gloves before folding her hands in her lap.
“How can I help you?”
“I saw your name on a card downstairs . . .”
“Ah. You frequent Harry’s?” I tried to keep several cards shoved under the glass top of the bar.
“No,” she said, decisively, wrinkling her nose. “I just needed . . . some hot coffee, this afternoon, and I saw your card there.”
No one with any money to speak of would go into Harry’s bar on a snowy afternoon for hot coffee. There is a boutique coffeehouse next door. The coffee is three dollars a pop, but it hasn’t sat on the burner all day.
There was a street march just a few weeks ago about the little war we have going on here, the war between the future and the past, so it was possible that she was from the future, trying to live in what was left of the past, for reasons which might spell money for me. As one of those who is quite fond of the past, I’d clung to the sinking ship for far too long. I didn’t like the view over there on the future side.
Or maybe I was just a sad old loser too stupid to take a chance.
I cradled the Scotch between both hands. “How can I help you?”
“I need you to get my mother and sister out of copyright. I want the rights to them.”
“They are . . . some kind of program?”
She nodded, a tragic look in her dark eyes. Her nose was slightly crooked, which gave her a charming air of imperfection.
“I think that you need a lawyer.”
She shook her head. “No. They can’t do anything for me. I went to one and she told me what needs to happen.”
“Which is?”
“They need to be out in the world, living on their own, without being formally accused of being artificial, for five years.”
“That’s a long time.”
“I want them now!”
“Where are they?”
“They were killed in a car crash four years ago. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Many years ago, my father had programs of us made so that we could be duplicated.”
“That would have been illegal.”
“At that time, yes.”
“It still is. But it was done fairly often, it seems.”
“Well. Anyway, it seems that my father has fallen in love with another woman. I attend the University of Virginia. It’s in Charlottesville.”
“I know.” It was about two hours away, a prestigious university. “And?”
“I came home for a visit last week, and found that my mother and sister were . . .” She bowed her head, covered her face with her gloved hands, and began to weep. Her thin shoulders shook. “He had them—disassembled.”
“What does that mean—disassembled?”
Did a brief look of satisfaction cross her face? She looked up again. “It means that their minds—their personalities—were erased, using a disassembly enzyme. At least—I mean, I’m not sure, exactly, how it works . . .” She shook her head in apparent disbelief.
“What happened?”
“I surprised him. The process wasn’t finished, and there were still loose ends he had to clean up. I had a key, of course, and just came in, a few days earlier than expected. I called out, got no answer, went looking for someone. A strange woman came out of the living room and said, ‘Who are you?’ My father came from the kitchen and she yelled ‘Frank, I thought you had taken care of this.’
“Then I looked over and saw my mother and my sister sitting on the couch. Their hands were folded in their laps and they were staring straight ahead. They didn’t recognize me. They didn’t even notice me. I ran over to them, shook them, screamed at them, cried. ‘What’s wrong?’ I kept saying over and over again. And after a minute, it dawned on me. Both of them, with that vacant look! I turned to my father and yelled at him to help, to stop it, to call a doctor. Instead, he grabbed my shoulders, tightly. His face looked different. Mean; angry. I tried to pull away but he wouldn’t let me go. I struggled and got loose. Ran out the door, down the street. He followed but couldn’t catch me.”
I sipped warm Scotch and surmised that she had not been wearing her high heels at that time. “I don’t mean to upset you, but you must explain to me how disassembly happens.”
“I’m not sure. I always thought it happened to . . . other people. Artificial people. Not me. Not my mother, my sister. Why would I think of it in relation to us? We are—we were—real! I never paid any attention to the news reports or controversy or anything. Certainly not any technical details.”
I lighted a cigarette. “Certainly creating artificial people is beyond the means of most people.”
“My father is very wealthy. He’s a well-known lawyer. Frank Quick. We live . . . I mean, I used to live, out in Great Falls. Here’s his address.” She slid a folded piece of paper across my desk.
I let it sit there. “I assume that you went to the police.”
“Oh, yes! There was nothing they could do. That was when I found out, you see, that I was a duplicate. It was quite a shock. I realized that he was planning to have me disassembled as well. Just get rid of the old family and have a new one!”
“You didn’t know before that you are artificial?”
“No. I didn’t know that we were killed in this car wreck. We were all in the hospital with various problems for quite some time afterwards. I had a broken neck. My mother had a ruptured spleen, and my sister suffered brain damage. My father could afford the most progressive therapies available. I thought that we had been healed, not re-created.”
“Was he in this automobile accident?”
“He was the driver.”
“Was he injured?”
“I believe he had some minor injuries.”
“Which hospital?”
I thought she hesitated before answering. “Arlington General.”
“It seems odd that he would go to such lengths to preserve all of you, and then suddenly get rid of you.”
She frowned. “I’m not sure what’s wrong with him. Some disease of the mind that he refuses to have diagnosed, I’m sure. His younger self would never have done such a thing. He loved us. He loved us so much that he went to great expense! But I suppose that . . . maybe something was missing in us, since we were not real. . . .” She looked at the floor and tears welled in her eyes and slowly moved down her thin, fine-boned face.
I pushed a box of tissue over toward her.
“But no one has challenged your right to exist. Correct?”
“I believe that he will, if he can’t disassemble me quietly. He doesn’t know where I am. I have no money right now; I’m sorry. I’m afraid that he might find me if I try and access any of my accounts. I need help.”
Just my luck. “What do you want me to do?”
She leaned forward. Her eyes gleamed in the light of the neon sign. “I want my mother back. And my sister. Their copies are in his safe. The updated information that can re-create them, right to the moment of their disassembly. I’ve drawn a map of the house on that paper that shows where the safe is. The house is alarmed; I included the code for you.”
“You are asking me to burgle a house, not solve a crime. Why can’t you do this yourself ?”
“I told you.” Her voice rose. “He wants to . . . do away with me. I fear for my life. I can’t go back there. I’m sure he’s trying to find me.” She blinked a few times, obviously trying to calm down. She succeeded, and continued in her previous, reasoned tone of voice. “I’m working on getting access to my accounts without giving away my location. I can have some money for you in a day or two.”
“My fees are one hundred dollars an hour, plus expenses. Travel, anything that I need to pay for. I require a retainer of a thousand dollars.”
“I will have to owe you.”
What else did I have to do?
On the other hand, my soul was just about the only thing I still owned and it seemed a good thing to have.
She must have noticed my indecision.
“There is one more thing,” she said, wiping her eyes with a tissue. “We might be real.”
“You mean that he might not really have re-created you after the accident.”
“Yes.”
“Then it would be murder.”
“Yes.”
“So it seems that you are not entirely sure about whether they were artificial or real.”
She hesitated a second. “No.”
I sighed. It was something. “I would be glad to investigate the possible murder of your mother and your sister, Ms. Quick, for the aforementioned fees. Do you have any photographs of them?”
“Ah . . . yes, but . . . why would you need them?” She looked confused and a bit irritated.
An interesting reaction. Most people want to provide the detective with all the information they have, no matter how irrelevant. “For my investigation.”
A tiny frown creased her forehead. She dug into her purse, took out a wallet, and tossed two photos onto my desk.
“And your father too?”
“Oh. Of course. Here. You’ll do it, then?”
“I told you: I will investigate the facts surrounding these possible murders.”
“But the copies?”
“If your mother and sister are indeed artificial persons, and their copies are in this safe, it is possible that the copies might fall into my hands during the course of my investigations.”
She did not look entirely satisfied, but nodded once. “All right.”
The next morning, after I rose from my couch and washed in the small bathroom in my office, I began to work in spite of myself. Old habits die hard.
I hadn’t told her, and she hadn’t asked. That was the strange part.
I was in a building that had not been infused with receptor capabilities. In pre-conversion language, it had not been wired.
But what was happening now—here, everywhere—was different from being wired. It was internal.
Communications—regular, old communications like the way they were back in the old days—were gone. Because of the electromagnetic interference. Telephones—and, therefore, the good old Internet—didn’t work. Broadcasting didn’t work. No one knew what was causing this, but it was like a long solar flare that might never end.
Arlington was being Converted to new biological ways of doing things. Interstices filled with benign bacteria capable of carrying an infinite amount of information ran up the sides of converted buildings. There was a port in every room, where a clear, semi-permeable membrane gave access to those who were converted, through the wonders of genetic engineering, and could send and receive information. They call it metapheromonal communication.
The owner of the Zephyr Building, in which I have my office, is a tightwad. When it became clear that he was never going to convert the building, most tenants moved out.
Julia Quick either did not know or did not mind that both the building and, by inference, myself, had not stepped into the future.
Or maybe she did, and, finding it to her advantage, didn’t care. It wouldn’t take much asking to find out about me. I was a bit of a local joke.
Outside, snow fell in great sheets. I turned my collar up and walked over to the morgue. It was six blocks but I needed the exercise and could not afford the Metro. I was still not sure what was compelling me to do this work. Not money, not yet. Ms. Julia Quick had disappeared last night after pressing my hands gratefully, her hands still in her expensive gray gloves, then clicking her way down the hall.
It took more than half an hour for them to believe my license, since I don’t have receptors. The woman behind the counter was astounded. She kept pulling other clerks over to gaze at my backward face. “Go ahead, touch him! There’s nothing there!”
“That’s because it’s all here,” I told her, pointing to my license on the counter.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “That’s just a piece of paper. You could say anything on a piece of paper.”
“So DNA can’t lie, right? Listen,” I said, getting hot. “The right hacker could slip in a new identity code in three minutes.”
“There’s no need to be rude. You may put that away.”
In a moment she slid a sheet of what looked like ordinary paper, but was not, across the counter. I took it and hurried out the front door. Cold wet snow still fell. I hiked across a courtyard, went down an open stairway where the wind blew an empty paper cup to and fro between concrete confines, and opened the familiar back door to the morgue.
Dr. Frisco had been there all night and I caught her just as she was leaving. She was consequently quite short with me. It was clear that she wanted to get home and get some sleep.
“Dr. Frisco?” I stepped in front of her as she strode down the hall, her white coat billowing behind her.
She glared at me. “What?”
“I need to ask some questions.”
“Who are you?” Her finger poised. The pad of her index finger was pale blue.
I dug out my license. She glanced at it. “No receptors?”
“No.”
“Your religion or something?”
“No.”
“Never mind. I remember you now. Private eye. Haven’t seen you in a while. What’s your question?”
“Do you recall seeing these bodies here?” I showed her the photos that Julia had left with me.
“No. Should I?” She looked more closely at the information on the sheet I handed her. “Four years ago? Are you kidding?”
“You signed their death certificates, here.”
She looked again; touched a circle at the bottom. “That’s not my signature.”
“Thanks. The other two?”
She shook her head, frowning. “No, these are all . . . forgeries. But you got them . . .” she touched the first one again. “You just got them over at registry.”
“So these people didn’t die?”
She looked at me impatiently. “You know as well as I do that all I’m saying is that these documents are fake. Some hacker has been in the system.” She sighed. “Well, it’s nothing new. I told them they were rushing into this too fast. Look, is that all?”
“Thanks.”
Julia returned that afternoon, still wearing the blue suit, but now wrapped in a dark wool cape with a hood.
I was glad that she showed up. I felt as if my morning had been a waste of time and I half-thought that I would never see her again, that she had been visited upon me by the gods of futility, who seemed to have made themselves comfortable in just about every area of my life. First the marriage, then my business, now the world . . .
On the other hand, she had provided me with something to be curious about. Something to make me want to live another day, just to see what happened.
She settled into the chair and again refused my offer of a drink.
I sipped carefully today. It was my last ounce and I was glad not to have to split it. My breakfast and lunch had been donuts.
“Did you get the copies?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“What have you done today?” she asked, her voice sharp.
“Not much. Tell me about the automobile accident.”
“I don’t remember it. We never discussed it. It was only when I found them . . . like that . . . that I started to investigate and discovered that we were all copies.”
“Then tell me about this process. How does one’s personality—one’s memories, everything—become pure information?”
“I don’t know, really. I only know that it can be done, and that it is being done all the time now. The information can be imbedded in various mediums.”
She did recall being “read,” when she was eleven years old. Her face softened and her eyelids lowered as she spoke in a low, singsong voice. “We drove into rural Virginia, toward the mountains. It was a cloudy fall day. My sister and I played games in the back seat.”
Her hooded cape was soaked, so I knew that she had walked and not taken the Metro; the entrance was only steps from the building. But walked from where? I let her keep talking.
“When we passed through Charlottesville, my father said that he had met the doctor who would be working with us at the University, and that he was very good. The highway kept going uphill and first it was foggy and then it was just cold and drizzly and we could hardly see beyond the car. We got off the highway at the top of the mountain and turned left.”
“You turned left?” I raised my eyebrows.
She scowled briefly. I probably wouldn’t have seen it save that the bar sign changed from red to bright white in that instant. She dropped her eyelids and continued. “Oh, yes. I remember very well. I’m good at directions. We went underneath a wrought-iron arch that said Swannanoa Life Extension Institute. It was an old stone place, kind of like a castle.
“The doctor was a big man. He had a beard. He seemed very nice. He wore a white coat and after the secretary had seated us and given us apple cider and, I think, my parents wine—there were oriental rugs on the floor and some classical music playing very softly—he and my parents went away. The secretary took us to another room where we played Go. It started snowing.”
“What was the name of this doctor?”
She continued in her dreamy, semi-hypnotized tone, “Doctor White.” Then her eyes widened for a fraction of a second and she swallowed. “I think.” She looked out the window. “No. It was . . . Green. Or . . . was it Elliott? I don’t remember. . . .”
“How long did it take?”
She answered eagerly. She seemed very happy to change the subject. “I don’t know. You dream a lot. But it’s not the same as regular sleep dreaming. Images race through your head, but they are very intense, very real.”
I’d read that they used a combination of powerful psychotropic drugs and hypnotism. But I’m no scientist. I can’t begin to understand how they can replicate identity. It would seem impossible. And people have complained that it doesn’t really work very well, the people who have had this done.
“What are you majoring in?” I asked.
She stared at me for a split second, then said, “Medicine, Mr. Jones. I am a second-year medical student. Although I don’t see what my personal life has to do with anything.”
“I realize that you have access to very little money, but at this point I will have to begin charging an hourly rate plus expenses. Today I spent four hours—”
“Four hours! What did you do?”
“I spoke to Dr. Frisco at the morgue.”
She became agitated. “The morgue! What were you doing there? All you need to do, Mr. Jones, is get the copies! I have given you the map; you know where it is in his bedroom; you can watch to see when he leaves the house! However you do such things!”
“I am the detective here, Ms. Quick.” I watched her face carefully. “I understand that you want and need documentation of the truth of the matter here, and that—”
She leaned forward in her chair abruptly. Her face was twisted. “I just want my sister and mother,” she hissed. “Get me the copies and I will pay you all the money that you could possibly want.”
“So you don’t really want to free them from the legal thrall of being merely a copy. Or even, it seems, re-create them.”
“That’s not true! Of course it isn’t! But this is the first step.”
“Tell me the truth. Why is it that you want these copies?”
“To prove—” she took a breath and looked out the window for a second before continuing. She cleared her throat. “To prove that my father committed this crime.”
“How? If what is in the safe is simply their original copies—”
She shook her head. “My sister and my mother had a system which was constantly updated. The information is embedded in the eye, which is removable and which does not degrade. When their copies are re-infused into a body, the information will be there.”
“Which of your eyes is it in?”
She blinked, staring at me once again. The light was dim, of course, but both looked perfectly normal to me. But then, I supposed, they would.
She stood. “You have all the information you need. I’m working on getting the money. I’ll be back with it tomorrow.” Her voice held an edge of hostility. She left in a hurry.
I slipped on my coat, waited for a moment, then followed her.
She walked downhill, towards Key Bridge.
She stepped onto the bridge and began to walk.
I could not believe it. No one crossed that bridge.
She walked casually; quickly; not as one who was afraid. Her hands were in her pockets and her head was up.
She disappeared into the fog.
I felt a stab of fear for her.
From this side, the city sometimes looked the same. The obelisk of the Washington Monument gleamed whitely in the sun, along with the Capitol dome. It appeared that people were inside, going about some kind of business. But often light was refracted from the city in strange ways, blurring what was visible. Binoculars sometimes revealed blocks where the city was older, where buildings torn down a hundred years ago had reappeared. Sometimes, it was claimed, famous Washingtonians like Duke Ellington or various dead presidents were spotted.
A team of scientists went in, at the beginning, wearing what they believed were impermeable suits. They never emerged. Other people disappeared from time to time as well. Crossing the bridge was widely regarded as being the same as committing suicide. Only the young, the curious, and the hopeless went inside. And the greedy. I had read an account of a man who had gone over in order to cart out antiques, only to have them disintegrate once they were out on the bridge, out of the fog of the city.
Some claimed that everything inside was a kind of holographic reproduction. Others thought that the nanotech surge that had overtaken the city that strange and terrible night had not simply replicated, perfectly, all that was there before, but had infused it with a mass mind that outsiders simply could not understand.
I did not follow Julia.
But I watched the shifting, dreamy lights of Georgetown through the fog for a long time before turning back.…
