Richard Morgan - Altered Carbon

We braked in the sky over a wide thoroughfare, sharply enough for someone above us to broadcast an outraged proximity squawk into the limousine’s comset. Curtis cut off the signal with a slap of one hand across the console and his face tilted up to glower dangerously through the roof window. We settled down into the flow of ground traffic with a slight bump and immediately made a left into a narrower street. I started to take an interest in what was outside.

There’s a sameness to streetlife. On every world I’ve ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behaviour seeping out from under whatever clanking political machine has been dropped on it from above. Bay City, Earth, most ancient of civilised worlds, had won itself no exemptions. From the massive insubstantial holofronts along the antique buildings to the street traders with their catalogue broadcast sets nestling on shoulders like clumsy mechanical hawks or outsize tumours, everyone was selling something. Cars pulled in and out from the kerbside and supple bodies braced against them, leaning in to negotiate the way they’ve probably been doing as long as there’ve been cars to do it against. Shreds of steam and smoke drifted from food barrows. The limo was sound- and broadcast-proofed, but you could sense the noises through the glass, corner-pitch sales chants and modulated music carrying consumer-urge subsonics.

In the Envoy Corps, they reverse humanity. You see the sameness first, the underlying resonance that lets you get a handle on where you are, then you build up difference from the details.

The Harlan’s World ethnic mix is primarily Slavic and Japanese, although you can get any variant tank-grown at a price. Here, every face was a different cast and colour—I saw tall, angular-boned Africans, Mongols, pasty-skinned Nordics and, once, a girl that looked like Virginia Vidaura, but I lost her in the crowd. They all slid by like natives on the banks of a river.

Clumsy .

The impression skipped and flickered across my thoughts like the girl in the crowd. I frowned and caught at it.

On Harlan’s World, streetlife has a stripped-back elegance to it, an economy of motion and gesture that feels almost like choreography if you’re not used to it. I grew up with it, so the effect doesn’t register until it’s not there any more.

I wasn’t seeing it here. The ebb and flow of human commerce beyond the limo’s windows had a quality like choppy water in the space between boats. People pushed and shoved their way along, backing up abruptly to get round tighter knots in the crowd that they apparently hadn’t noticed until it was too late to manoeuvre. Obvious tensions broke out, necks craned, muscled bodies drew themselves up. Twice I saw the makings of a fight take stumbling shape, only to be swept away on the chop. It was as if the whole place had been sprayed with some pheromonal irritant

“Curtis.” I glanced sideways at his impassive profile. “You want to cut the broadcast block for a minute?”

He looked across at me with a slight curl of the lip. “Sure.”

I settled back in the seat and fixed my eyes on the street again. “I’m not a tourist, Curtis. This is what I do for a living.”

The street sellers’ catalogues came aboard like a swarm of delirium-induced hallucinations, slightly diffuse through lack of directed broadcast and blurring swiftly into each other as we glided along, but still an overload by any Harlanite standards. The pimps were the most obvious; a succession of oral and anal acts, digitally retouched to lend an airbrushed sheen to breasts and musculature. Each whore’s name was murmured in throaty voiceover, along with a superimposed facial: coy little girls, dominatrixes, stubbled stallions and a few from cultural stock that was completely alien to me. Weaving in between were the more subtle chemical lists and surreal scenarios of the drug and implant traders. I caught a couple of religious ‘casts amidst it all, images of spiritual calm among mountains, but they were like drowning men in the sea of product.

The stumbling started to make sense.

“What does from the Houses mean?” I asked Curtis, trawling the phrase from the ‘casts for the third time.

Curtis sneered. “The mark of quality. The Houses are a cartel; high-class, expensive whorehouses up and down the coast. Get you anything you want, they say. If a girl’s from the Houses, she’s been taught to do stuff most people only ever dream about.” He nodded at the street. “Don’t kid yourself, no one out there ever worked in the Houses.”

“And Stiff ?”

He shrugged. “Street name. Betathanatine. Kids use it for near death experiences. Cheaper than suicide.”

“I guess.”

“You don’t get ‘thanatine on Harlan’s World?”

“No.” I’d used it offworld with the Corps a couple of times, but there was a ban in fashion back home. “We got suicide, though. You want to put the screen back up.”

The soft brush of images cut out abruptly, leaving the inside of my head feeling stark, like an unfurnished room. I waited for the feeling to fade and, like most after-effects, it did.

“This is Mission Street,” said Curtis. “The next couple of blocks are all hotels. You want me to drop you here?”

“You recommend anywhere?”

“Depends what you want.”

I gave him one of his own shrugs back. “Light. Space. Room service.”

He squinted thoughtfully. “Try the Hendrix, if you like. They got a tower annexe, and the whores they use are clean.” The limousine picked up speed fractionally and we made a couple of blocks in silence. I neglected to explain I hadn’t meant that kind of room service. Let Curtis draw the conclusions he seemed to want to.

Unbidden, a freeze frame of Miriam Bancroft’s sweat-dewed cleavage bounced through my mind.

The limo coasted to a halt outside a well-lit façade in a style I didn’t recognise. I climbed out and stared up at a huge holocast black man, features screwed up presumably in ecstasy at the music he was wringing left-handed from a white guitar. The image had the slightly artificial edges of a remastered two-dimensional image, which made it old. Hoping this might indicate a tradition of service and not just decrepitude, I thanked Curtis, slammed the door and watched the limousine cruise away. It began to climb almost immediately and after a moment I lost the tail lights in the streams of airborne traffic. I turned to the mirrored glass doors behind me and they parted slightly jerkily to let me in.

If the lobby was anything to go by, the Hendrix was certainly going to satisfy the second of my requirements. Curtis could have parked three or four of Bancroft’s limos side by side in it and still have had space to wheel a cleaning robot round them. I wasn’t so sure about the first. The walls and ceiling bore an irregular spacing of illuminum tiles whose half-life was clearly almost up, and their feeble radiance had the sole effect of shovelling the gloom into the centre of the room. The street I’d just come in off was the strongest source of light in the place.

The lobby was deserted, but there was a faint blue glow coming from a counter on the far wall. I picked my way towards it, past low armchairs and shin-hungry metal-edged tables, and found a recessed monitor screen swarming with the random snow of disconnection. In one corner, a command pulsed on and off in English, Spanish and Kanji characters:

SPEAK.

I looked around and back at the screen.

No one.

I cleared my throat.

The characters blurred and shifted: ELECT LANGUAGE.

“I’m looking for a room,” I tried, in Japanese out of pure curiosity.

The screen jumped into life so dramatically that I took a step backwards. From whirling, multi-coloured fragments it rapidly assembled a tanned Asian face above a dark collar and tie. The face smiled and changed into a Caucasian female, aged fractionally, and I was facing a blonde thirty-year-old woman in a sober business suit. Having generated my interpersonal ideal, the hotel also decided that I couldn’t speak Japanese after all.