Hammered (6 page)

Feynman frowned doubtfully. “What’s the practical application of that?”

“Oh, hell, Dick—if you don’t mind my calling you that—what isn’t the functionality of it? Stroke victims—Oh, damn, we
are
old. Here we stand in a virtual playground, talking shop.”

“Well, to be honest,” Feynman answered with a laugh, setting his drink down to twist his hands around the dented rail, “it’s more interesting than most of what goes on in here.”

“You think?” The bartender picked up the liquor bottle and poured. A glass appeared on the bar as if conjured there, catching the stream of fluid a second before it struck and splashed. “I’d say that depends on which corner of this little world you happen to hang out in.”

Feynman leaned forward, shoulders hunching like a perched hawk’s. “You don’t find the unreality a little distressing?”

“What’s so unreal about it?” The bartender shrugged, tilting his head back, regarding the virtual ceiling for a second or two. He looked back down at last and met Feynman’s gaze. “It’s not any more unreal than the intellectual space in which a chess game takes place. Consensus reality.”

Feynman chuckled and picked up his drink, spinning the glass in his hand, spilling nothing. His other hand wiggled quotes in the air. “How do we know anything exists outside our heads?”

“Isn’t that a little fluffy for a physicist, Dick?”

“Not at all. You can’t observe a thing without changing it, after all. The universe is a glorious puzzle that seems to keep altering even as we unravel it. There’s one wag who’s working on that as a basis for faster-than-light communication. Ansibles, more or less.”

“All right, I’ll bite. What’s an ansible?”

“Faster-than-light communication, based on quantum mechanics. No, really. It’s from a science fiction book.”

“Ah.” The bartender finished his drink. “What would you need faster-than-light communication for?”

“Talking to things that are very far away,” the physicist answered, eyes twinkling. “But you were telling me about your work.” He looked into the age-spotted mirror over the bar, seeming unaccountably amused by the reflection.

“Funny. I never thought of the coincidence before—but there’s something like an observer effect in my own field of study.” The bartender looked up at Feynman with a grin.

“Everything’s interrelated.”

“I tend to agree. I’m looking into the psychosomatic basis of rejection. Why some people just cannot adapt to a transplant or a prosthesis, and others do just fine.”

“Huh.” The physicist hooked a tall chair over with a booted foot and settled himself, leaning forward over the bar. One foot still kicked restlessly. “Interesting.”

“I think so,” the bartender said, warming to his topic. Bartenders love to talk as much as they love to be talked to. “Well—let’s see. I can tell you this much without violating confidentiality. I have one patient coming in for follow-up on some work done almost thirty years ago. Late forties, serious trauma: one of the first cyberprosthetic patients. But she’s made a better adjustment than
any
of my patients with more modern prostheses. Funny thing—half the hands we sew on, we wind up cutting back off again. People just freak out about it. Bored yet?”

“Fascinated. I remember reading some of Sacks’s popular work on similar topics. Something about a guy who couldn’t recognize his own leg as a part of his body.”

“You read old books, Dick.”

“I’m an old guy. Is that what you’re talking about?”

The bartender nodded vigorously, excitement staining his voice. “Similar stuff, yes—now throw in the trauma of a dismemberment on top of it. Messy.”

“I imagine. So, about your patient …”

“Her hardware—the fucking thing is literally spliced into her spinal cord in two places, and there’s brain work, too. The old, dangerous method. The scarring is something to behold.”

“Didn’t that cripple most of the patients?”

“Not most. Maybe 30 percent. Guy who pioneered it back in the thirties—his name eludes me at the moment—was mostly working with kids who got cut up in South Africa, if I recall. He may have made a few extra cripples, but this particular lady is only walking because of what he did for her. Most—maybe all—of the others are dead now. The long-term survival odds on the nano work are much better.”

“I imagine.” Feynman rubbed the lower half of his face.

The bartender nodded hard—the nod of a young man, not the elderly one he appeared. “Anyway, she’s been seeing me for about ten years, and I’ve discovered the weirdest thing. She’s made adaptation like you wouldn’t believe. And she’s been generous enough to help me in some of the VR work I’ve done. She’s ideally suited for it. And!—I think I know why she’s been doing so well for so long.”

Feynman had an odd way of tilting his head to one side when he was thinking hard. “Why’s that?”

The bartender paused for a moment, as if he had an idea that his interviewer already suspected the answer to the question. “Somehow, she’s managed to get her brain to do the opposite of what Sacks’s patient did. It thinks the hand is her hand, a part of her body. Integrated. And the neatest part, the one that I can use to really good effect if I can figure out how she does it—”

Feynman leaned forward as if pouncing. “I see. Your
stroke patients and a VR interface. If you get them to accept the interface as part of their reality … That could be dramatic.”

“Yeah,” the bartender said. “Dramatic.”

His guest got up to leave, still nodding, and the bartender held up a hand. “Hey. Come back anytime you want to talk shop.”

The stranger turned halfway back and smiled. “Thanks,” he answered. “But I probably won’t.” And then he turned and walked out of the saloon, leaving his host befuddled behind the bar.

Colonel Valens pinched the bridge of his commanding nose, leaning back in his chair. An emotion he identified as frustration sat on his chest. He ignored it. “The damned problem, Alberta, is I know exactly who I want for a test subject. I know she’s still alive, she’s out there somewhere, and I have only half a damned clue where to find her.”

A petite woman with her gray hair twisted up in a chignon, Alberta Holmes leaned back comfortably in a leather-upholstered armchair in the corner of Valens’s office. She laced her fingers together and rested them on her knee. “One of the subjects from your cybernetics program, I assume?”

Valens nodded. “A master corporal when I worked with her. Genevieve Casey. Good soldier, nice kid. A little impulsive.” Unconsciously, he rubbed his left shoulder with
his right hand, as if massaging stiffness. “Pretty much got the left side of her body blown off when the A.P.C. she was driving found the wrong end of an antitank missile. Amazing she survived at all. We patched her up, though. Better than new.”

“This is important because?” But Holmes leaned forward in her chair and uncrossed her legs.

Smiling, Valens touched an icon on the synthetic crystal interface plate set into his desktop. The rich brown wood of the furniture gleamed through the transparent plate: quite a change from his previous office with its issue desk and issue computer. Holmes reached down and unclipped her HCD from the pocket of her tailored jacket.

“As you can see from the files I beamed you, she had significant spinal injury to go with the head trauma and the gross bodily damage. We put a pretty serious enhancement package in her when we did the repairs, and she’s already got over twenty years’ worth of adaptation.”

Holmes looked doubtful. “Which means what? She’s old and slowing down?”

Valens chuckled. “It means we don’t have to wait for her to adapt to her enhancements, to develop the kinesthetic sense that goes along with moving differently than you have all your life, to learn to process the information overload that comes with the heightened senses. What you have to understand is that these people feel more, hear more, and the levels of information the enhancements provide have provoked some of them into a hypersensitivity syndrome resembling autism.”

He stood, pacing around the desk. “I’ve got four survivors, Alberta. Two of them are probably useless for the project because they can’t stand human contact, loud noises, whatever. One might be a good candidate; he’s come through
the nanosurgery well, but he’s emotionally unstable. He’s on Clarke already—”

“So … Master Corporal Casey—”

“Master Warrant Officer.”

“I thought you said—”

Valens shook his head, smiling like a proud and slightly bemused father. “She finished out her twenty. Even went back into combat as a medevac pilot—flying for pararescue techs—after four years as an instructor. Decorated a dozen times; saved a bunch of lives. And I know she’s out there somewhere, because the army is still paying her pension and disability.”

“Can’t we use that to find her?”

“Internet account. We could maybe have it cracked, but no success yet, and our best programmer on staff wouldn’t do it. Hell, couldn’t be told about the attempt. He knows Casey.”

“Ah.”

“She doesn’t
want
to be found. I’ve made a point of recruiting her old friends, though. That may provide us with a lead. I’ve got taps.” He leaned back against his desk, looking down at her.

She met his eyes directly. “Illegal.”

“Military Powers Act.”

“Why not just pull your programmer’s connectivity bills instead of hiring him on?”

“We did. She’s using an anonymous relay through the offshore Sealand haven; unless we can get a live trace, we’ve got nothing. I wish I’d known a year ago that we’d be needing somebody like her; I’d have her in by now. But I’ve also hired her older sister, who—conveniently to our purpose—is a ronin.”

“Barbara Casey.” Alberta nodded. “She’s got a very good reputation. I’ve used her for a few jobs, through Unitek.”

“That’s how I got her information, actually. There aren’t many people who do what she does.”

“But why just these particular subjects, Fred? Why so much effort into finding this one woman?”

Valens shrugged. “Not ‘just’ them, Alberta, or her. Them, and maybe a dozen other candidates we’ve identified through the preliminary testing. I think Genevieve Casey is by far our best bet, though, of the four like her we have left.”

“But you can’t find her?”

He grinned and spread his hands wide. “Not without access to some confidential files I haven’t been able to crack yet. But if her sister doesn’t work out, well, she would have needed regular follow-up care. The body never really recovers from the kind of insults hers has sustained, and her cyberware—it’s the rankest kind of flattery to call it
primitive.
There’s a lead there, too, and I’ve got her nailed down to a state, at least. Barbara’s there now.”

Holmes stood, strong and graceful despite the lines mapping her gracious face. “She’d better be everything you say she is, Fred. Her, or one of the others. After the—is
debacle
too strong a word?—you oversaw on Mars, you need a damned success more than I do. Which is saying something.”

Understanding the note in her voice, Valens swallowed once.

The western sky is still graying down to indigo, but the sun has long set behind the Gothic train station and crumbled yellow brick storefronts at the edge of the park. Hood
of a bleach-stained sweatshirt pulled over my hair, I lean against a tatterdemalion white oak near an unmaintained baseball diamond and watch the dealers and the prostitutes saunter past. There’s one little Latina with big brown eyes, skinny as a rake in a glow-patterned miniskirt and leg-breaking heels, who is shattering my heart with every
hey bay-bee
at a passing car.

I bet she’s thirteen, fourteen. Same age as Gabe’s older daughter. Same age I was when I ran away from home. After Maman died, and I had had enough of Barb’s tender care.

Doesn’t much bear considering. I turn away, watching the street kids and the adult predators and the vagabond lost weave through the night. A pair of Hammerheads wander by, check me out to make sure I’m not 20-Love or a Latin King. My sweatshirt is dark blue, nondescript, and they let me pass.

The king’s men.

They’re watchful, and the park is peaceful for now, but it’s too big a humpty dumpty to really put back together, isn’t it? I turn my head and spit, scanning the area with my bad eye as darkness swells, the heat of bodies shimmering green-blue, barely distinguishable against the warmth of the night. Cars swing down Asylum Avenue, headlights razor-edging the party girls.

Ladies of the evening.

It all sounds so genteel.

That little Latina is getting into the passenger seat of a dark-windowed sedan, and I want to go drag her out by the ankles and tell her the rules. Rule number one, you
never
get in the car. But then the door shivers closed, and it’s too late to do anything. I hope they’re just going for a ride around the block, brief pause in a side alley, no longer than the time it takes to smoke a cigarette.

I’ve moved as close to the little knot of dealers on the corner
of Asylum and Jewell as I can get without looking suspicious, but in the fading light I’m having a hell of a time seeing what they’re handing to the customers. Even low-light vision isn’t helping me—every little plastic twist, baggie, or vial is palmed to a client with a practiced flick of the hand just as the cash chits vanish into pockets. I even see some folding, old-fashioned American money change hands.

Can’t have a black market without it.

I’m still waiting while the Milky Way smears itself across the heavens and a a sliver of moon glides down the sky, shedding blue light. East, the lights of the Travelers’ tower drench the darkness, washing away the stars. I shove my hands into my sweatshirt and wander aimlessly toward the closest of the baggy-jacketed dealers, my boots scuffing dirt and dead grass.

“Whatcha need, my man?” He turns to look me up and down. I stare at his shoes. Little lights flicker along the sides of shining white sneakers. Stupid if he thinks he might have to run, but there’s a lot of stupid on the streets.