Richard Morgan - Altered Carbon

“Yeah?”

“I’d like to speak to Sheryl Bostock.”

“Yeah, well she ain’t here.”

I sighed and rubbed at the scar under my eye. “I think that’s probably not true. Her copter’s in the yard, you’re her son, Daryl, and she came off night shift about three hours ago. Will you tell her there’s someone to see her about the Bancroft sleeve.”

“You the Sia?”

“No, I just want to talk. If she can help me, there might be some money in it for her.”

The boy stared at me for another pair of seconds, then closed the door without a word. From inside, I heard him calling his mother. I waited, and fought the urge to smoke.

Five minutes later Sheryl Bostock appeared around the edge of the door, dressed in a loose kaftan. Her synthetic sleeve was even more expressionless than her son had been, but it was a slack-muscled blankness that had nothing to do with attitude. Small muscle groups take a while to warm up from sleep on the cheaper model synthetics, and this was definitely a model from the cut-price end of the market.

“You want to see me?” the synth voice asked unevenly. “What for?”

“I’m a private investigator working for Laurens Bancroft,” I said as gently as I could. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about your duties at PsychaSec. May I come in?”

She made a small noise, one that made me think she’d probably tried to shut doors in men’s faces before without success.

“It won’t take long.”

She shrugged, and opened the door wide. I passed her and stepped into a tidily kept but threadbare room whose most important feature was clearly a sleek black entertainment deck. The system reared off the carpeting in the far corner like an obscure machine-god’s idol, and the remaining furniture had been rearranged around it in obeisance. Like the microcopter’s paint job, it looked new.

Daryl had disappeared from view.

“Nice deck,” I said, going over to examine the machine’s raked display front. “When did you get it?”

“A while ago.” Sheryl Bostock closed the door and came to stand uncertainly in the centre of the room. Her face was waking up and now its expression hovered midway between sleep and suspicion. “What do you want to ask me?”

“May I sit down?”

She motioned me wordlessly to one of the brutally used armchairs and seated herself opposite me on a lounger. In the gaps left by the kaftan, her synthetic flesh looked pinkish and unreal. I looked at her for a while, wondering if I wanted to go through with this after all.

“Well?” She jerked her hand at me nervously. “What do you want to ask me? You wake me up after the night shift, you’d better have a good goddamn reason for this.”

“On Tuesday 14th August you went into the Bancroft family’s sleeving chamber and injected a Laurens Bancroft clone with a full hypospray of something. I’d like to know what it was, Sheryl.”

The result was more dramatic than I would have imagined possible. Sheryl Bostock’s artificial features flinched violently and she recoiled as if I’d threatened her with a riot prod.

“That’s a part of my usual duties,” she cried shrilly. “I’m authorised to perform chemical input on the clones.”

It didn’t sound like her speaking. It sounded like something someone had told her to memorise.

“Was it synamorphesterone?” I asked quietly.

Cheap synths don’t blush or go pale, but the look on her face conveyed the message just as effectively. She looked like a frightened animal, betrayed by its owner.

“How do you know that? Who told you that?” Her voice scaled to a high sobbing. “ You can’t know that. She said no one would know .”

She collapsed onto the sofa, weeping into her hands. Daryl emerged from another room at the sound of his mother crying, hesitated in the doorway, and evidently deciding that he couldn’t or shouldn’t do anything, stayed there, watching me with a frightened expression on his face. I compressed a sigh and nodded at him, trying to look as unthreatening as possible. He went cautiously to the sofa and put a hand on his mother’s shoulder, making her start as if from a blow. Ripples of memory stirred in me and I could feel my own expression turning cold and grim. I tried to smile across the room at them, but it was farcical.

I cleared my throat. “I’m not here to do anything to you,” I said. “I just want to know.”

It took a minute or so for the words to get through the cobwebby veils of terror and sink into Sheryl Bostock’s consciousness. It took even longer for her to get her tears under control and look up at me. Beside her, Daryl stroked her head doubtfully. I gritted my teeth and tried to stop the memories of my own eleventh year welling up in my head. I waited.

“It was her,” she said, finally.

Curtis intercepted me as I came round the seaward wing of Suntouch House. His face was darkened with anger and his hands were curled into fists at his sides.

“She doesn’t want to talk to you,” he snarled at me.

“Get out of my way, Curtis,” I said evenly. “Or you’re going to get hurt.”

His arms snapped up into a karate guard. “I said, she does—”

At that point I kicked him in the knee and he collapsed at my feet. A second kick rolled him a couple of metres down the slope towards the tennis courts. By the time he came out of the roll, I was on him. I jammed a knee into the small of his back and pulled his head up by the hair.

“I’m not having a great day,” I told him patiently. “And you’re making it worse. Now, I’m going up there to talk to your boss. It’ll take about ten minutes, and then I’ll be gone. If you’re wise, you’ll stay out of the way.”

“You fuck—”

I pulled his hair harder and he yelped. “If you come in there after me, Curtis, I’m going to hurt you. Badly. Do you understand? I’m not in the mood for swampsuck grifters like you today.”

“Leave him alone, Mr. Kovacs. Weren’t you ever nineteen?”

I glanced over my shoulder to where Miriam Bancroft stood with her hands in the pockets of a loose, desert-coloured ensemble apparently modelled on Sharyan harem-wear. Her long hair was caught up under a swathe of the ochre cloth and her eyes glinted in the sun. I remembered suddenly what Ortega had said about Nakamura. They use her face and body to sell the stuff . Now I could see it, the casual poise of a fashion-house sleeve demonstrator.

I let go of Curtis’s hair and stood back while he climbed to his feet. “I wasn’t this stupid at any age,” I said untruthfully. “Do you want to tell him to back off, instead? Maybe he’ll listen to you.”

“Curtis, go and wait for me in the limousine. I won’t be long.”

“Are you going to let him—”

“Curtis!” There was a cordial astonishment in her tone, as if there must be some mistake, as if answering back just wasn’t on the menu. Curtis’s face flushed when he heard it, and he stalked away from us with tears of consternation standing in his eyes. I watched him out of sight, still not convinced I shouldn’t have hit him again. Miriam Bancroft must have read the thought on my face.

“I would have thought even your appetite for violence had been sated by now,” she said quietly. “Are you still looking for targets?”

“Who says I’m looking for targets?”

“You did.”

I looked quickly at her. “I don’t remember that.”

“How convenient.”

“No, you don’t understand.” I lifted my open hands towards her. “I don’t remember it. Everything we did together is gone. I don’t have those memories. It’s been wiped.”

She flinched as if I’d struck her.

“But you,” she said in pieces. “I thought. You look—”