Richard Morgan - Altered Carbon

“Ah, go ahead. What the fuck do you know about it anyway? Bancroft’s not people like you and me. He’s a fucking Meth.”

“A Meth?”

“Yeah. A Meth. You know, and all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years . He’s old. I mean, really old.”

“Is that a crime, lieutenant?”

“It should be,” said Ortega grimly. “You live that long, things start happening to you. You get too impressed with yourself. Ends up, you think you’re God. Suddenly the little people, thirty, maybe forty years old, well they don’t really matter any more. You’ve seen whole societies rise and fall, and you start to feel you’re standing outside it all, and none of it really matters to you. And maybe you’ll start snuffing those little people, just like picking daisies, if they get under your feet.”

I looked seriously at her. “You pin anything like that on Bancroft? Ever?”

“I’m not talking about Bancroft,” she waved the objection aside impatiently, “I’m talking about his kind . They’re like the AIs. They’re a breed apart. They’re not human, they deal with humanity the way you and I deal with insect life. Well, when you’re dealing with the Bay City police department, having that kind of attitude can sometimes backup on you.”

I thought briefly of Reileen Kawahara’s excesses, and wondered how far off the mark Ortega really was. On Harlan’s World, most people could afford to be re-sleeved at least once, but the point was that unless you were very rich you had to live out your full span each time and old age, even with antisen treatment, was a wearying business. Second time around was worse because you knew what to expect. Not many had the stamina to do it more than twice. Most people went into voluntary storage after that, with occasional temporary re-sleevings for family matters, and of course even those re-sleevings thinned out as time passed and new generations bustled in without the old ties.

It took a certain kind of person to keep going, to want to keep going, life after life, sleeve after sleeve. You had to start out different, never mind what you might become as the centuries piled up.

“So Bancroft gets short-changed because he’s a Meth. Sorry, Laurens, you’re an arrogant, long-lived bastard. The Bay City police has got better things to do with its time than take you seriously. That kind of thing.”

But Ortega wasn’t rising to the bait any more. She sipped her coffee and made a dismissive gesture. “Look, Kovacs. Bancroft is alive, and whatever the facts of the case he’s got enough security to stay that way. No one here is groaning under the burden of a miscarriage of justice. The police department is underfunded, understaffed and overworked. We don’t have the resources to chase Bancroft’s phantoms indefinitely.”

“And if they’re not phantoms?”

Ortega sighed. “Kovacs, I went over that house myself three times with the forensics team. There’s no sign of a struggle, no break in the perimeter defences and no trace of an intruder anywhere in the security net’s records. Miriam Bancroft volunteered to take every state-of-the-art polygraphic test there is and she passed them all without a tremor. She did not kill her husband, no one broke in and killed her husband. Laurens Bancroft killed himself, for reasons best known to himself, and that’s all there is to it. I’m sorry you’re supposed to prove otherwise, but wishing isn’t going to make it fucking so. It’s an open-and-shut case.”

“And the phone call? The fact Bancroft wasn’t exactly going to forget he had remote storage? The fact someone thinks I’m important enough to send Kadmin out here?”

“I’m not going to argue the toss with you on this, Kovacs. We’ll interrogate Kadmin and find out what he knows, but for the rest I’ve been over the ground before and it’s starting to bore me. There are people out there who need us a lot worse than Bancroft does. Real death victims who weren’t lucky enough to have remote storage when their stacks were blown out. Catholics getting butchered because their killers know the victims will never come out of storage to put them away.” There was a hooded tiredness building up in Ortega’s eyes as she ticked the list off on her fingers. “Organic damage cases who don’t have the money to get re-sleeved unless the state can prove some kind of liability against somebody. I wade through this stuff ten hours a day or more, and I’m sorry, I just don’t have the sympathy to spare for Mr. Laurens Bancroft with his clones on ice and his magic walls of influence in high places and his fancy lawyers to put us through hoops every time some member of his family or staff wants to slide out from under.”

“That happen often, does it?”

“Often enough, but don’t look surprised.” She gave me a bleak smile. “He’s a fucking Meth. They’re all the same.”

It was a side of her I didn’t like, an argument I didn’t want to have and a view of Bancroft I didn’t need. And underneath it all, my nerves were screaming for sleep.

I stubbed out my cigarette.

“I think you’d better go, lieutenant. All this prejudice is giving me a headache.”

Something flickered in her eyes, something I couldn’t read at all. There for a second, then gone. She shrugged, put down the coffee mug and swung her legs over the side of the shelf. She stretched herself upright, arched her spine until it cracked audibly and walked to the door without looking back. I stayed where I was, watching her reflection move among the city lights in the window.

At the door, she stopped and I saw her turn her head.

“Hey, Kovacs.”

I looked over at her. “Forget something?”

She nodded her head, mouth clamped in a crooked line, as if acknowledging a point in some game we’d been playing.

“You want an insight? You want somewhere to start? Well, you gave me Kadmin, so I guess I owe you that.”

“You don’t owe me a thing, Ortega. The Hendrix did it, not me.”

“Leila Begin,” she said. “Run that by Bancroft’s fancy lawyers, see where it gets you.”

The door sliced closed and the reflected room held nothing but the lights of the city outside. I stared out at them for a while, lit a new cigarette and smoked it down to its filter.

Bancroft had not committed suicide, that much was clear. I’d been on the case less than a day and already I’d had two separate lobbies land on my back. First, Kristin Ortega’s mannered thugs at the justice facility, then the Vladivostock hitman and his spare sleeve. Not to mention Miriam Bancroft’s off-the-wall behaviour. Altogether too much muddied water for this to be what it purported to be. Ortega wanted something, whoever had paid Dimitri Kadmin wanted something, and what they wanted, it seemed, was for the Bancroft case to remain closed.

That wasn’t an option I had.

“Your guest has left the building,” said the Hendrix, jolting me out of my glazed retrospection.

“Thanks,” I said absently, stubbing out the cigarette in an ashtray. “Can you lock the door, and block the elevators from this floor?”

“Certainly. Do you wish to be advised of any entry into the hotel?”

“No.” I yawned like a snake trying to engorge an egg. “Just don’t let them up here. And no calls for the next seven-and-a-half hours.”

Abruptly it was all I could do to get out of my clothes before the waves of sleep overwhelmed me. I left Bancroft’s summer suit draped over a convenient chair and crawled into the massive crimson-sheeted bed. The surface of the bed undulated briefly, adjusting to my body weight and size, then bore me up like water. A faint odour of incense drifted from the sheets.

I made a half-hearted attempt to masturbate, mind churning damply through images of Miriam Bancroft’s voluptuous curves, but I kept seeing Sarah’s pale body turned to wreckage by the Kalashnikov fire instead.