K Jeter: Noir

Stuff like that couldn’t be overlaid; no analogues existed in McNihil’s monochrome world. The little machines continued their work, visibly, like some nightmare of a future that had already arrived.

McNihil pointed to the busy wound. “Why’s he all prepped for transplant harvesting?”

“That’s just standard procedure.” The flunky had hesitated a moment before speaking up, in case Harrisch or any of the other brass had felt like explaining. “Procedural standards, for the company.”

“That’s what we do,” said one of the other execs. His voice was a dog’s growl in a man’s nasopharynx. “That’s the kind of organization we are.”

“Condition of employment.” Whenever any of the brass spoke, the flunky bounced on the balls of his feet for a moment, as though the invisible leash had been yanked. “Public service sort of thing. Your organs are company property. All the suites and cubes and efficiencies have inbuilt Detect- &-Dissect™ kits keyed to the employees’ vital signs; they drop, you’re popped.” The flunky had settled down, but his quick laugh jerked him up again, marionettelike. “Usable pieces get stitched into deserving orphans.”

“Why waste ’em?” The one brass rumbled again.

“True.” McNihil looked the man in the red-rimmed eye. “If nothing else, you could serve them over rice in the executive lunchroom.”

No laugh or smile. “If we wanted to,” the brass agreed quietly.

Harrisch, the senior exec, had hung back, letting the lower rankings have a go at the asp-head they’d invited here. Their relative positions on the DZ corporate ladder were obvious to McNihil, just from the density of the swarms of E-mail buzzing around their heads. Some of the execs had only two or three of the tiny holo’d images yattering around them for attention; the bottom rungs had enough that their faces could barely be seen past them. Swatting did no good; every once in a while, one of the junior execs would have to turn away, crouching over in a corner and downing enough of them, muttering quick responses into his Whisper-Throat™ mike, to get a few seconds of relief. Harrisch had none; either the corporation was paying for max’d-out filtration or he was high up enough to have gone on an elite paper-only status. He at least was at no risk of being overloaded, prostrate on the floor and buried under a thickening flock of messages, like a dead cowboy beneath vultures in a Western landscape à la John Ford.

McNihil looked back down at the corpse and poked it with the toe of his shoe. “What was this poor bastard’s name?”

“Travelt.” The flunky bobbed helpfully at his side. “His name was Travelt.”

“First name?”

Silent and unrepeated, the question went around the cubapt’s living space. The execs looked vaguely embarrassed, either from not knowing or knowing and not wanting to admit it.

A wallet was in the corpse’s jacket pocket; McNihil had spotted the flat rectangular shape. He stood back up, flipping the soft leather open. “William,” he announced, reading it off a company ID card. “In case you were wondering.” The driver’s license was-in McNihil’s vision-a nice overlaid replica of what somebody would’ve been carrying around circa the Eisenhower administration. The tiny photo showed the corpse’s face above an early IBM-white dress shirt and blue-striped tie. In life, the late Travelt had looked like a version-in-training of the older and harder ones standing around watching. At that stage, he’d still looked more human than not.

McNihil tapped the image with his forefinger. He knew that would trigger the ID codes embedded in the card, over in the hard world beneath the one he saw.

“Assembling tomorrow today,” spoke a bass-enhanced voice. The words sounded as confident as they would have if the speaker had still been alive. “Add value and evolve-”

“Whatever.” He flipped the wallet closed. The ID card/driver’s license mumbled for a second longer, then was quiet. He handed the wallet to the flunky, who looked at it as if it were the chilled spleen from the corpse’s viscera. “Obviously not a close friend of yours.”

“That’s not important,” said Harrisch.

He made no reply. For a moment, McNihil felt as if the temperature level of the refrigerant devices had seeped out and clamped around his own guts. And from there, across the re-created cubapt’s manicured spaces, through the tall windows and out over the world at large. Though he supposed it had less to do with the dead thing at his feet than with the other ones standing around him, who were still capable of motion and speech, however limited. If his blood had dropped a few degrees, it was their proximity effect that had caused it.

The corpse’s eyes were shiny enough to make little curved, silvery mirrors. McNihil saw now, as he looked down, that the eyes weren’t just filmed over by death; another film had been laid over them, a chilling membrane like the ones wrapped around the corpse’s heart and kidneys. Preserving the corneas for those lucky orphans. But which now made the dead eyes into even better mirrors, as though polished by silversmiths; he could see his face in them, doubled. The two miniature faces gazing back up at him looked old and tired, the fatigue producing the age rather than the other way around. He wished even more that he hadn’t come here, hadn’t let himself be bullied into coming.

“So what do you think?” Harrisch loomed up beside him. “Think you can help us on this one?”

He saw that an edge of the corpse’s opened shirt, only lightly stippled with blood and other fluids, lay across the tip of the exec’s glossy handmade shoes. McNihil looked up and shook his head. “Like I was trying to tell the boy you sent to get me. I don’t do this kind of work.”

“But you could if you wanted to. If we made it the kind of job you’d want to take on. You’re still on the agency’s list, as a licensed operative.”

Another shake of the head. “Wake up and smell the burning corpses of your dreams, pal. I don’t know what the connect you’re thinking of. This is way off-zone for me. I don’t take care of this kind of shit; I’ve never taken care of this kind of shit. Even when I was working for the Collection Agency-and I’m not now-” As if they didn’t know that. “But when I was, I never showed up when people were already dead and sorted out their problems. That’s not what asp-heads do. Even if I were one anymore. And I’m not.” McNihil widened his eyes, to ensure that the message went as straight as possible into the other man’s. “ Natterkopf bin ich nicht . Got it?”

Harrisch didn’t give up. “You have special qualifications. You have to admit that-”

“I don’t have to admit anything. Except I’m ready to say good-bye now.”

“Oh, please.” Harrisch widened his smile. Now it looked like the result of trying to carve a Hallowe’en pumpkin with a single stroke of a machete. “We’re just starting to enjoy your company. I take back what I said about you before.”

Harrisch’s eyes, the center of them, were black mirrors instead of silvered, but they showed the same thing as the corpse’s blank gaze. In the two dark curves, McNihil saw his tiny reflections again. If that face looked tired and disgusted, and not easily talked into taking this kind of a job, McNihil figured it had a right to. He’d already been connected over enough in this lifetime, in the world he’d started out in and the one he saw in his taken-apart-and-stitched-together eyes. Maybe the guy on the floor, or what was left of him, had had the same kind of luck. Maybe the guy had connected up. One way or another. It didn’t really matter.

“Special qualifications,” repeated Harrisch. “That’s why we asked you to come here.”