Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

Feynman had also devoted part of his attention to following various other individuals who had captured his interest — among them, Colonel Valens, Dr. Alberta Holmes, Master Warrant Officer Casey, and Detective Kozlowski. The gangster was harder to keep track of.

This sequence was repeated many, many times in the moments before the train lurched forward. Particularly interesting was the information provided by the fragment of himself exploring possible inroads to Unitek through the Avatar Gamespace. If anything, those pathways were better protected than the Internet routes he’d spent eight days haunting before he finally cracked them.

For the Feynman AI, eight days was an interminably long time. And his reward for that toil had been…

Nothing.

And the designs for an FTL drive — probably, as near as he could tell, the one being used for the starship in the virtual reality game — with no physics or explanation to back it up. Just schematics, as if such a thing could be built from a kit like a crystal radio set.

He was almost annoyed enough to risk contacting Dunsany directly. Problematic, when he knew Unitek had her under tighter surveillance than he did. He could hide the traces of his observations. Might even be able to risk contacting someone who Valens feared and needed less. Trying to speak to Elspeth would be akin to suicide, or surrender.

If he were a man, his stomach would have been twisted into a knot of frustration. Very few people in a long, recorded lifetime had had the wit to take him one-on-one, philosophically, and Feynman would have loved to have known what had changed Elspeth’s mind, made her see him as a person as well as a program. He wanted to talk to her again. To argue. To sit down and have a good intellectual wrangle.

The surveillance was too tight. He might have hid a contact from electronic scrutiny. But Feynman — once through the firewall — had hacked their feed, and he knew that in addition to remote surveillance, Unitek was having her tailed, and that somebody monitored every Net access or phone call she made. He was beginning to suspect that Valens knew perfectly well he was out there. He just couldn’t decide if Valens was trying to keep him out… or lure him in.

With a sigh, he shifted focus to Leah. She hadn’t noticed the lapse. “What about you, Penelope?”

The character he was playing, of course. Wearing the mask of a sixteen-year-old, black-haired girl with a Grecian nose and flashing eyes, Feynman turned on his considerable charm. “I’ve got the neural implants, of course. Papa gave them to me for my fifteenth birthday. How can you hope to fly the big ship otherwise?”

He chose to feel a little bad, watching her face fall. His human self would have been unhappy, manipulating an adolescent girl. Feynman strove to remember these things. It was important to him, that taste of being human. “We could never afford that. But I still want to win.”

“Of course we do. And you have to be careful, Leah”—Feynman leaned forward conspiratorially—“there are many people here who cannot be trusted.”

“But you can?”

The AI laughed. “More than most. It is just a game to me, after all. I do not need the scholarships, or the other prizes. And I am not a small person who has need to cheat against other players to win.”

“A small person?” Leah looked interested. He wondered if her eyes in real life were quite so bright a green, her hair so blonde. He’d never know, really, outside of the camera lens, and he thought that should make him a little sad.

Feynman paused, as if Penelope cast about for words in an unfamiliar tongue. “Petty? A petty person? But it seems unfair that you, who do need the scholarships, cannot compete on equal terms for them. What a pity that we do not know anyone who works for Unitek.”

“Why?” Leah’s eyes seemed doubtful, but her icon was leaning forward.

Feynman tossed Penelope’s dark curls over his shoulder. “I am not without skills,” he said, as if it were a great admission. “But the computers that process most of the game information are very hard to get to.”

He chuckled silently when Leah grinned.

1300 hours, Saturday 9 September, 2062

Niagara, New York

American Side

“Razorface, this is as far as you’re coming.”

We stand above the vast crescent of the falls, and the earth quivers underfoot. I smell wet air, the green leaves still trembling on the trees, sun on cut grass and concrete. He raises his left hand to point at the center of my face. I can just about hear him over the falling water. “You gonna walk in her trap just like that? A dog on a leash got more sense.”

“Probably. But you have things to do back in Hartford, and I have places to be. Besides…” I lean in close, aware that Barb can read my lips. “I need somebody at my back. There’s this thing with Mashaya, with Mitch. It’s bigger than it looks, and it’s a damn weird coincidence that my fucking sister shows up now, in the middle of all this other mess. It’s too much coincidence, and I don’t like it.”

Silence falls like a curtain. I gnaw on my lower lip, fighting a spate of shivers that wants to run down my spine. It was a long, long drive up the northway, following Barb’s sporty blue Honda Agouti while Face alternately slumped silent and belligerent in the passenger seat or argued ferociously against the plan.

“You say you ain’t talked to her in years.”

“I haven’t. Not since 2039 or so.” She got in touch with me after the terrorism trial where I was star witness for the prosecution against a very young man named Bernard Xu, but known to me as Peacock. I was on the news a lot, for a while. Between that and the visible cyberware — the combat enhancements were classified, of course — I had been a nine-day’s wonder. Sometime later, I heard that Xu had died in prison at the age of twenty-five. Same age I was when I got my new arm.

I’m sure I don’t need to spell out the details.

I finished out my twenty years in ’49, took my pension, and got the hell out of Canada. Never went back except to visit Gabe and the girls.

And here I am, staring at the barbed wire and armed guards of the border from a hundred meters, my sister in her running car only a few steps away. I hear her music through the rolled-up window, but she doesn’t shoot me the impatient glance I half expect. Barb has always been good at hiding things.

Razorface scowls, an imposing sight. “So how the hell does she know you’re sick? How did she know where to find you?”

I’ve been wondering that myself, Face. And I wish I could tell him that I don’t trust her, that I don’t like her, that I know I’m being played. But I remember Simon lying to me about the red lines on the monitor, and I remember a phone call from Gabe Castaign, and the name Valens from his lips and now from Barbara’s. And I have a nasty itchy back-of-the-neck premonition that it’s something more than coincidence that thirty years of history are turning up on my doorstep all at once.

Much as I’d like to see Barb strung up by her own paste-colored intestines, she’s my sister and I’m not going to speak ill of her to anyone. Maman wouldn’t have liked it. How a level head and a kind heart like Maman managed to raise a pair of sociopaths like Barb and me, I’ll never know. And these are all things I’d like to say to Razorface, but I wouldn’t know where to start talking and he wouldn’t know how to listen.

So I punch him in the arm with my good hand and what I say is, “Feed Boris for me.”

Razorface puts a hand heavy as a slab of meat on my shoulder. “You keep in touch. I don’t hear from you every twenty-four hours, I’m coming looking. Got it?”