Kiln People, Page 2

  I’m me. As little life as I have left, it still feels precious. Yet I gave up what remains, jumping in the river to save some other guy a few credits.

  Some guy who’ll make love to my girlfriend and relish my accomplishments.

  Some guy who shares every memory I had, till the moment he (or I) lay on the copier, last night. Only he got to stay home in the original body, while I went to do his dirty work.

  Some guy who’ll never know what a rotten day I had.

  It’s a coin flip, each time you use a copier-and-kiln. When it’s done, will you be the rig … the original person? Or the rox, golem, mule, ditto-for-a-day?

  Often it hardly matters, if you re-sorb memories like you’re supposed to, before the copy expires. Then it’s just like two parts of you, merging back together again. But what if the ditto suffered or had a rough time, like I had?

  I found it hard to keep my thoughts together. After all, this green body wasn’t built for intellect. So I concentrated on the task at hand, dragging one foot after another, trudging through the mud.

  There are locales you pass by every day, yet hardly think about because you never expect to go there. Like this place. Everyone knows the Gorta is filled with all sorts of trash. I kept stumbling over stuff that had been missed by the cleaner-trawls … a rusted bike, a broken air conditioner, several old computer monitors staring back at me like zombie eyes. When I was a kid, they used to pull out whole automobiles, sometimes with passengers still inside. Real people who had no spare copies in those days, to carry on with their smashed lives.

  Those times had some advantages. Back in Grandpa’s day, the Gorta stank from pollution. Eco laws brought the stream back to life. Now folks catch fish from the quay. And fish converge whenever the city drops in something edible.

  Like me.

  Real flesh is supple. It doesn’t start flaking after just twenty-four hours. Protoplasm is so tenacious and durable that even a drowned corpse resists decay for days.

  But my skin was already sloughing, even before I fell in. Expiration can be held off by willpower for a while. But now the timed organic chains in my ersatz body were expiring and unraveling with disconcerting speed. The scent swirled, attracting opportunists who came darting in from all sides for a feed, grabbing whatever chunks seemed close to falling off. At first I tried batting at them with my remaining hand, but that only slowed me down without inconveniencing the scavengers much. So I just forged ahead, wincing each time a pain receptor got snipped off by a greedy fish.

  I drew a line when they started going for the eyes. I was going to need vision for a while yet.

  At one point warm water shoved suddenly from the left, a strong current pushing me off course. The flow did drive off the scavengers for a minute, giving me a chance to concentrate …

  Must be the Hahn Street Canal.

  Let’s see. Clara’s boat is moored along Little Venice. That should be the second opening after this one … Or is it next?

  I had to fight my way past the canal without being pushed down into deep water, somehow finally managing to reach the stone embankment on the other side. Unfortunately, persecuting swarms reconverged at that point — fish from above and crabs from below — drawn by my oozing wounds, nipping and supping on my fast-decaying hide.

  What followed was a blur — a continual, shambling, underwater slog through mud, debris, and clouds of biting tormentors.

  It’s said that at least one character trait always stays true, whenever a ditto is copied from its archetype. No matter what else varies, something from your basic nature endures from one facsimile to the next. A person who is honest or pessimistic or talkative in real flesh will make a golem with similar qualities.

  Clara says my most persistent attribute is pigheaded obstinacy.

  Damn anyone who says I can’t do this.

  That phrase rolled over and over through my diteriorating brain, repeating a thousand times. A million. Screaming every time I took a painful step, or a fish took another bite. The phrase evolved beyond mere words. It became my incantation. Focus. A mantra of distilled stubbornness that kept me slogging onward, dragging ahead, one throbbing footstep at a time … till the moment I found myself blocked by a narrow obstacle.

  I stared at it a while. A moss-covered chain that stretched, taut and almost vertical, from a buried anchor up to a flat object made of wooden planks.

  A floating dock.

  And moored alongside lay a vessel, its broad bottom coated with jagged barnacles. I had no idea whose boat it was, only that my time was about up. The river would finish me if I stayed any longer.

  Using my one remaining mangled hand, I gripped the chain and strained to free both feet of the sucking mud, then continued creeping upward in fits and jerks, rising relentlessly toward a glittering light.

  The fish must have sensed their last chance. They converged, thrashing all around, grabbing whatever flaps and floating folds they could, even after my head broke surface. I threw my arm over the dock, then had to dredge memory for what to do next.

  Breathe. That’s it. You need air.

  Breathe!

  My shuddering inhalation didn’t resemble a human gasp. More like the squelch that a slab of meat makes when you throw it onto a cutting board and then slice it, letting an air pocket escape. Still, some oxygen rushed into replace the water spilling from my lipless mouth. It offered just enough renewed strength to haul one leg aboard the planking.

  I heaved with all my might, at last rolling completely out of the river, thwarting the scavengers, who splashed in disappointment.

  Tremors rocked my golembody from stem to stern. Something — some part of me — shook loose and fell off, toppling back into the water with a splash. The fish rejoiced, swirling around whatever it was, feeding noisily.

  All my senses grew murkier, moment by moment. Distantly, I noted that one eye was completely gone … and the other hung nearly out of its socket. I pushed it back in, then tried getting up.

  Everything felt lopsided, unbalanced. Most of the signals I sent, demanding movement from muscles and limbs, went unanswered. Still, my tormented carcass somehow managed to rise up, teetering first to the knees … and then onto stumps that might loosely be called legs.

  Sliding along a wooden bannister, I flopped unevenly up a short flight of steps leading to the houseboat that lay moored alongside. Lights brightened and a thumping vibration grew discernable.

  Garbled music played somewhere nearby.

  As my head crested the rail, I caught a blurry image — flickering flames atop slim white pillars. Tapered candles … their soft light glinting off silverware and crystal goblets. And farther on, sleek figures moving by the starboard rail.

  Real people. Elegantly dressed for a dinner party. Gazing at the river beyond.

  I opened my mouth, intending to voice a polite apology for interrupting … and would someone please call my owner to come get me before this brain turned to mush?

  What came out was a slobbery groan.

  A woman turned around, caught sight of me lurching toward her from the dark, and let out a yelp — as if I were some horrible undead creature, risen from the deep. Fair enough.

  I reached out, moaning.

  “Oh sweet mother Gaia,” her voice swung quickly to realization. “Jameson! Will you please phone up Clara Gonzalez, over on the Catalina Baby? Tell her that her goddam boyfriend has misplaced another of his dittos … and he better come pick it up right now!”

  I tried to smile and thank her, but scheduled expiration could no longer be delayed. My pseudoligaments chose that very moment to dissolve, all at once.

  Time to fall apart.

  I don’t remember anything after that, but I’m told that my head rolled to a stop just short of the ice chest where champagne was chilling. Some dinner guest was good enough to toss it inside, next to a very nice bottle of Dom Pérignon ’38.

  2

  Ditto Masters

  … or how realAlbert copes with a
rough day …

  All right, so that greenie didn’t make it home in one piece. By the time I came to fetch it, only the chilled cranium was left … plus a slurry of evaporating pseudoflesh staining the deck of Madame Frenkel’s houseboat.

  (Note to self: buy Madame a nice gift, or Clara will make me pay for this.)

  Of course I got the brain in time — or I wouldn’t have the dubious pleasure of reliving a vividly miserable day that “I” spent skulking through the dittotown underworld, worming through sewers to penetrate Beta’s lair, getting caught and beaten by his yellowdit enforcers, then escaping through town in a frenzied dash, culminating in that hideous trudge through underwater perdition.

  I knew, even before hooking that soggy skull into the perceptron, that I wasn’t going to savor the coming meal of acrid memories.

  For what we are about to receive, make us truly thankful.

  Most people refuse to inload if they suspect their ditto had unpleasant experiences. A rig can choose not to know or remember what the rox went through. Just one more convenient aspect of modern duplication technology — like making a bad day simply go away.

  But I figure if you make a creature, you’re responsible for it. That ditto wanted to matter. He fought like hell to continue. And now he’s part of me, like several hundred others that made it home for inloading, ever since the first time I used a kiln, at sixteen.

  Anyway, I needed the knowledge in that brain, or I’d be back with nothing to show my client — a customer not known for patience.

  I could even find a blessing in misfortune. Beta saw my green-skinned copy fall into the river and never come up. Anyone would assume it drowned, or got swept to sea, or dissolved into fish food. If Beta felt sure, he might not move his hideout. It could be a chance to catch his pirates with their guard down.

  I got up off the padded table, fighting waves of sensory confusion. My real legs felt odd — fleshy and substantial, yet a bit distant — since it seemed like just moments ago that I was staggering about on moldering stumps. The image of a sturdy, dark-haired fellow in the nearby mirror looked odd. Too healthy to be real.

  Monday’s ditto’s fair of face, I thought, inspecting the creases that sink so gradually around your real eyes. Even an uneventful inloading leaves you feeling disoriented while a whole day’s worth of fresh memories churn and slosh for position among ninety billion neurons, making themselves at home in a few minutes.

  By comparison, outloading feels tame. The copier gently sifts your organic brain to engrave the Standing Wave onto a fresh template made of special clay, ripening in the kiln. Soon a new ditto departs into the world to perform errands while you have breakfast. No need even to tell it what to do.

  It already knows.

  It’s you.

  Too bad there wasn’t time to make one right now. Urgent matters came first.

  “Phone!” I said, pressing fingers against my temples, pushing aside disagreeable memories of that river bottom trek. I tried to concentrate on what my ditective had learned about Beta’s lair.

  “Name or number,” a soft alto voice replied from the nearest wall.

  “Get me Inspector Blane of the LSA. Scramble and route to his real locale. If he’s blocked, cut in with an urgent.”

  Nell, my house computer, didn’t like this.

  “It’s three o’clock in the morning,” she commented. “Inspector Blane is off duty and he has no ditto facsimiles on active status. Shall I replay the last time you woke him with an urgent? He slapped us with a civil privacy lien of five hundred—”

  “Which he later dropped, after cooling off. Just put it through, will you? I’ve got a splitting headache.”

  Anticipating my need, the medicine cabinet was already gurgling with organosynthesis, dispensing a glassful of fizzy concoction that I gulped while Nell made the call. In muted tones I overheard her arguing priorities with Blane’s reluctant house comp. Naturally, that machine wanted to take a message instead of waking its boss.

  I was already changing clothes, slipping into a bulky set of Bullet-guard overalls, by the time the Labor Subcontractors Association inspector answered in person, groggy and pissed off. I told Blane to shut up and join me near the old Teller Building in twenty minutes. That is, if he wanted a chance to finally close the Wammaker Case.

  “And you better have a first-class seizure team meet us there,” I added. “A big one, if you don’t want another messy standoff. Remember how many commuters filed nuisance suits last time?”

  He cursed again, colorfully and extensively, but I had his attention. A distinctive whine could be heard in the background — his industrial-strength kiln warming up to imprint three brute-class dittos at a time. Blane was a guttermouth, but he moved quickly when he had to.

  So did I. My front door parted obligingly and Blane’s voice switched to my belt portable, then to the unit in my car. By the time he calmed down enough to sign off, I was already driving through a predawn mist, heading downtown.

  I closed the collar of my trench coat, making sure the matching fedora fit low and snug. Clara had stitched my private eye outfit for me by hand, using high-tech fabrics she swiped from her Army Reserve unit. Great stuff. Yet the protective layers felt barely reassuring. Plenty of modern weapons can slice through textile armor. The sensible thing, as always, would be to send a copy. But my place is too far from the Teller Building. My little home kiln couldn’t thaw and imprint quickly enough to make Blane’s rendezvous.

  It always makes me feel creepy and vulnerable to go perform a rescue or arrest in person. Risk isn’t what realflesh is for. But this time, what choice was there?

  Real people still occupy some of the tallest buildings, where prestigious views are best appreciated by organic eyes. But the rest of Old Town has become a land of ghosts and golems, commuting to work each morning fresh from their owners’ kilns. It’s an austere realm, both tattered and colorful as zeroxed laborers file off jitneys, camionetas, and buses, their brightly colored bodies wrapped in equally bright and equally disposable paper clothes.

  We had to finish our raid before that daily influx of clay people arrived, so Blane hurriedly organized his rented troops in predawn twilight, two blocks from the Teller Building. While he formed squads and passed out disguises, his ebony lawyer-golem dickered with a heavily armored cop — her visor raised as she negotiated a private enforcement permit.

  I had nothing to do except chew a ragged fingernail, watching daybreak amid a drifting haze. Already, dim giants could be seen shuffling through the metropolitan canyons — nightmarish shapes that would have terrified our urban ancestors. One sinuous form passed beyond a distant streetlight, casting serpentine shadows several stories high. A low moan echoed toward us and triassic tremors stroked my feet.

  We should finish our business before that behemoth arrived.

  I spied a candy wrapper littering the sidewalk — a strange thing to find here. I put it in my pocket. Dittotown streets are usually spotless, since most golems never eat or spit. Though you do see a lot more cadavers, smoldering in the gutter, than when I was a kid.

  The cop’s chief concern — to ensure none of today’s bodies was real. Blane’s jet black copy argued futilely for a complete waiver, then shrugged and accepted the city’s terms. Our forces were ready. Two dozen purple enforcers, lithe and sexless, some of them in disguise, moved out according to plan.

  I glanced again down Alameda Boulevard. The giant silhouette was gone. But there would be others. We’d better hurry, or risk getting caught in rush hour.

  To his unwatered joy, Blane’s rented mercenaries caught the pirates off-guard.

  Our troops slinked past their outer detectors in commercial vans, disguised as maintenance dits and courier-golems making dawn deliveries, making it nearly up the front steps before their hidden weapons set off alarms.

  A dozen of Beta’s yellows spilled out, blazing away. A full-scale melee commenced as clay humanoids hammered at each other, losing limbs to slugfire or ex
ploding garishly across the pavement when sprays of incendiary needles struck pseudoflesh, igniting the hydrogen-catalysis cells in spectacular mini-fireballs.

  As soon as shooting started, the armored city cop advanced with her blue-skinned duplicates, inflating quick-barricades and noting infractions committed by either side — anything that might result in a juicy fine. Otherwise, both sides ignored the police. This was a commercial matter and none of the state’s business, so long as no organic people were hurt.

  I hoped to keep it that way, sheltering behind a parked car with realBlane while his brute-duplicates ran back and forth, urging the purples on. Quick and crude, his rapid-rise dittos were no mental giants, but they shared his sense of urgency. We had just minutes to get inside and rescue the stolen template before Beta could destroy all evidence of his piracy.

  “What about the sewers?” I asked, recalling how my recent greendit wormed its way inside yesterday … an excursion as unpleasant to remember as that later trek along the river bottom.

  Blane’s broad face contorted behind a semi-transparent visor that flashed with symbols and map overlays. (He’s too old-fashioned to get retinal implants. Or maybe he just likes the garish effect.) “I’ve got a robot in there,” he grunted.

  “Robots can be hacked.”

  “Only if they’re smart enough to heed new input. This one is a cable-laying drone from the Sanitation Department. Zingleminded and dumb as a stone. It’s trying to bring a wide-baud fiber through sewer pipes into the basement, heading stubbornly for Beta’s toilet. Nobody’s getting past the thing, I promise.”

  I grunted skeptically. Anyway, our biggest problem wasn’t escape, but getting to the hideout before our proof melted.

  Any further comment was cut off by a novel sight. The policewoman sent one of her blue copies strolling right in the middle of the battle! Ignoring whizzing bullets, it poked away at fallen combatants, making sure they were out of commission, then severed their heads to drop into a preserva sac for possible interrogation.