Electric Church

XVII ALL HUMAN BEINGS, SAVED OR UNSAVED

It was about the time they served the coffee that I really started to freak out.

Marcel had come through in spades. He didn’t just get me passage, he got me first-class passage-handed over with a fake ID and a stern command to find myself some appropriate clothes and clean up a little. That part was simple enough. Night had fallen and the SSF was closing in methodically, not rushing things, probably because they were enjoying themselves too much. I followed a small band of merrymakers through the streets uptown and waited for them to sack an appropriate house. The owner was one of the foolish rich shits who’d decided to stay and defend his property; he popped up, silver-maned and wearing a silk smoking jacket, with a brand-new automatic Roon in each hand like he was Buffalo Bill or something. He nailed about four of the merrymakers before they stormed his windows, and the last I saw of him he was running down the street with his hair on fire.

His house quickly followed, and the merrymakers scurried out like rats in twos and threes, bearing away anything that could be sold quickly. I waited until they were all gone, judged the fire, and then went in for a quick shower and a change of clothes. Rich people fireproofed their homes, which stopped fires altogether for a few years, and even when the antiflame compounds aged and started to break down it slowed a fire down considerably-it took hours for them to burn down, and I knew you could pack a bag and take a nap before a fire became a real concern. It was burning slowly but steadily when I emerged, shaved and rubbed pink by expensive towels, wearing one of the poor sap’s suits.

I couldn’t bring myself to wear his underwear, and the merrymakers hadn’t left anything else of value.

It would have been nice to steal a hover and arrive at the airport in style, but the SSF had grounded New York and would have knocked me out of the air immediately, so I had to hoof it. The System Cops had the Madison Square AirPad under their control, so air traffic was still moving in and out for VIPs and necessary commerce. It was a long walk, but I was passed through the gates by two bored Crushers-luckily, strangers to me-who were as polite to me as any had ever been, if still grouchy. They called me “mister” and told me to have a nice day after running yellow eyes over my ID. It was the clothes-no one saw much more than a clean guy in an expensive suit. If they looked closer they might notice the bad teeth, the scars, the accent-but they didn’t look close. You could hand them a hand-written ID with the name spelled wrong and they’d pass you through if you looked rich. Looking rich was a skill any criminal worth his salt learned early.

Then it was straight onto the heavy-duty long-range hover, a comfortable seat behind an attractive, porcelain-skinned red-haired woman I recognized from the Vids, and a glass of beer pressed into my hand, all within the first five minutes. The seat was soft and supple. The air inside the hover was clean and crisp. The fabric of the poor sap’s clothes was dry and sumptuous against my skin.

I began to freak out.

The woman, a few years older than me but gorgeous, twisted around to smile at me. I’d seen her reporting the news a few times, her face ten feet high, her smile permanent and frighteningly unchangeable. “Time to get out, huh? These people.” She shook her head in dismay. “They’re so ignorant. Burning down their own city. I think the System Police should just ship them all somewhere.”

I swallowed anger. The fact that this rich bitch thought New York was my city made me want to grab her by the nose and smash her head into the armrest. Instead I smiled. “It’s the SSF’s fault. They’re too slack.”

She nodded, but didn’t seem to like my smile. It might have been my teeth, which hadn’t had the benefit of a dentist. Ever. “Yes. I quite agree,” she said, facing forward again without another word. I imagined I could smell the soap on her skin. Or maybe that was my skin; I was so clean I itched.

The meal service started, brought soundlessly by human-looking Droids who smiled but couldn’t speak, and my will to retire rich tripled. Rich was the only way to live in the System. When you were rich, the System Pigs called you sir and wished you a good day. When you were rich, they served you breakfast on the hover-real eggs, real bacon, and sweet lord, when the coffee came, hot and strong in a cup so white I had to squint at it, I lost all reason. I promised myself I would do anything it took to be rich. And then it occurred to me that I was already doing whatever it took.

The flight to London was only two hours. After breakfast they dimmed the lights and put on the Vids, each of us getting a small but serviceable private Vid screen. Only the Legal Vid feeds, of course. In New York alone there were fifteen illegal underground Vid feeds I knew of providing news and such on a constant basis, beaming from Safe Rooms around the city. The difference between the legal and illegal feeds was startling. The legal feeds were certainly censored, but the illegal ones had their own agendas, so who knew what to believe. I was half-asleep, feeling exhausted and beaten, when the news came on and I sat up straight, startled. The anchor was the woman sitting in front of me; the caption read Marilyn Harper. She was reporting on the riots, standing blithely in the midst of the merrymakers as they looted a row of stores. She looked smart in a short suit, her hair up, her skin too white, too pale, too clean to be standing in New York in the middle of something like that.

She signed off and I was about to try to get some sleep, when the next news segment came on and I almost puked up my breakfast. It was the Marilyn Harper again. The caption underneath was: “BROTHER BARNABY DAWSON: Former SSF cop, now Monk, suspect in two assaults.”

I gestured the volume up so violently it shrieked up to full blast, causing all the other passengers to twist around in annoyance. I gestured it to a low hum and sat forward.

“-son, former captain in the System Security Force recently detained by Internal Affairs on charges of official misconduct, is now suspected in two assaults on System citizens in New York City.”

I stared at the file photograph. His crazy blue eyes seemed to dance even on the flat screen.

“The System Security Force has declined to comment on Captain Dawson. The Electric Church, in a statement issued from its London office, said only that, quote, ‘No brother of the Church would ever be violent or seek to harm any other human being. The Electric Church regards all human beings, saved or unsaved, as its family, and seeks only to bring the entire human race into God’s embrace.’ Dawson, who served fifteen years in the SSF primarily in the New York area, reportedly identified himself several times while viciously beating-”

I gestured the sound off again. Dawson’s face continued to stare at me from the screen for a few seconds as Harper wrapped up her report, and then it disappeared. I gestured the Vid off.

She twisted around again. In person, she looked older-more lines around the face-but they had that “smoothing” technology now and could make anyone look any age they wanted. “Scary, huh? First time ever a Monk is officially suspected of violent behavior. Guess it had to happen sometime. They start off as humans-and usually not the best kind of humans either.” She studied me. “Don’t I know you? You look familiar.”

Fucking Vid reporter. I could have been seated behind some aristocrat, sneering at the riffraff they let onto flights these days, but I get someone who’s had her nose in SSF databases all her life.

I shook my head. “No.”

She studied me for a few more seconds, then made a big show of losing interest. “Must be tired. I’ve been knee-deep in shitkickers burning their own houses down the last twenty-four hours. Sorry to bother you.”

I stared at the back of her seat. This was shit I didn’t need. I knew she was going to remember my face and do some checking around. She wouldn’t be a Vid reporter otherwise. I thought about Dawson, too. She was right; no Monk had ever been involved in or accused of a crime, and certainly not a violent one-not counting, I thought sourly, the millions of apparent murders they’d committed in their routine recruitment activities. Marin had told me that the Monks were controlled by a behavioral chip of some sort, that the human brain inside was probably screaming as it provided the basic operating system and motor control subroutines-not to mention the brainwave ID that kept the Monks citizens of the System. I considered the possibility that this control chip had malfunctioned somehow in Dawson’s case. That he was maybe the same crazy fucker I’d tried to kill, only now in a metal body, armed to the teeth, with access to the Electric Church’s database and network. Under that rock was the squirming, wriggling possibility that Dawson had been set loose on me on purpose, to kill me with plausible deniability for the EC.

It was certainly turning into a banner day for Avery Cates. I called for the attendant Droid and demanded a bourbon. It was brought to me immediately, a double in a crystal tumbler, frozen granite cubes instead of ice. I hadn’t had decent liquor in a decade. It was smooth and perfect, and made me a little giddy. I thought to myself, If I live to pull this off, I’ll probably go mad in a few years from all the meals, the booze, the fucking Droids tending to my every need-everything.

The landing was a little rough, the hover doing a straight vertical deadhead drop in the rain, winds tearing at it. The Droids moved up and down the aisle reassuring us that everything was fine, that this was normal. It didn’t bother me. I’d been through worse.

From behind her, I leaned to the right and watched what I could of Marilyn Harper. Some random jiggle of her cleavage reminded me that I hadn’t been with a woman in a while, but I suppressed the thought. Too many mediocre crooks just like me had been gunned with their pants down. It was just too risky. I was convinced that she was going to mess with me. I knew she thought she recognized me from some SSF file she’d seen-lord knew I was in plenty-and she was probably thinking of ways to confirm without tipping her hand.

Without warning, she glanced over and noticed me leaning out into the aisle, and did a double take. Then she twisted around and smiled at me.

“There’s a few things in that Dawson report I wasn’t allowed to say, you know,” she said brightly. “Since you seemed interested. The goddamn SSF got a JC order to suppress, and I couldn’t put all the details on the air. The two people he beat up? One might actually still die; he’s in SSF custody and they certainly don’t give a shit about him. Both were just two-bit hoods, known around a bar called Pickering’s where all the little shitheel crooks hang out.”

I kept my face impassive. “That’s interesting.”

She kept her bright green eyes on mine. “Both reported the same thing: Dawson was trying to beat information out of them. He was looking for someone, someone they were known to associate with.”

I wanted very badly to slap her. I licked my lips. “Really? Who?”

She smiled. “Some piece-of-shit Gunner named Avery Cates. Brother Dawson told both of them he was going to find this Cates and tear him limb from limb.”

With a hollow thud, we landed in London.