redRobe

Chapter Twenty The Diamond Way

Its detractors might call Samsara a victimDisney themepark, but Vajrayana still had some of the best medical and legal AIs that money could hire.

Axl woke only once, realised he wasn’t on a shuttle and tumbled back into darkness. At first sight, the demons that inhabited the dark were almost anachronistical Freudian, full of red snakes that twisted tight around his wrists or ate their way under his flesh until only their tails could be seen poking from ragged gashes in his skin.

Only later, days later, did he realise that a mediSoft on Samsara had been reprocessing his blood. Siphoning it off to mix with interleukin-4, before adding heat-killed bacterium and retrovirus triggers to dentritic cells to sensitise them, feeding the mix back to his body to repair what was left of its immune system.

Not a cheap process and the mediSoft did it before it even knew if the ‘fugee crimes board would allow him to stay.

The old man nodded, nothing else. No questions were asked. In fact, so far as Axl could tell, the man with the odd-shaped felt hat kept his eyes shut throughout the interview. Though the abbot did stop chanting just long enough to mutter something that made even the small boy who’d led a staggering Axl into the cold, vast chamber look surprised.

‘Metal Monkey.’

It sounded like a surf band, something West Coast classic that Axl just knew he’d hate. Chopping Gibson Les Pauls, rhyming verses and some over-easy, cheesy-listening bridge, all masquerading as garage chic. He hoped metal monkey meant something to the boy, because it sure as hell meant nothing to him.

In total he was in the ice-cold room about five seconds, but given the length of the shivering queue he’d been bumped to the front of, Axl was surprised he’d got that long.

And then it was on to a smaller, more clinical room to see someone else.

‘Are you a war criminal?’ The question was in English.

Axl thought about it. Most of his brain was taken up with trying to remember. Except that while he was still hitting recall the young paralegal sat on the other side of the desk repeated the question, only this time in German.

Axl was still thinking about it when the man asked again in Norwegian. Only this time Axl didn’t recognise the language but it didn’t matter, because by then he’d forgotten the question.

Finally the man gave up asking if Axl had committed warcrimes and concentrated on finding a language in common. Not knowing he’d already achieved a hit rate of three out of seven.

‘Do you speak Japanese?’

Not enough to answer. Axl frowned, shook his head and shivered. Ground zero in Samsara started at 6800 feet and rose steeply outside the central valley. At least it did where temperature, oxygen content and atmospheric pressure was concerned. If he got any colder he’d be doing involuntary cryo.

The young man sat in front of Axl smiled. He was shaven-headed and hatless, bare to the waist, his lower half wrapped in a saffron robe. Rubber sandals were tied to his feet with twine. His smile was as gentle as his impossible questions were polite.

Chinese, Axl thought. He’d heard that ultimate cool among Beijing’s refusniks was to turn Buddhist and go work for the Dalai Lama. Learn to be quiet, be serene… Things had been somewhat different the last time Axl had met someone Chinese. Back then, back there a doe-eyed girl had ripped every nail from Axl’s right hand, using pliers. And when he still refused to confess, her father had apologetically eased a cattle prod into Axl’s anus and fried his colon so badly the first thing Axl did on being sprung was stop-off at Delhi to get a quick and dirty transplant.

The family was being rehabilitated, Axl learned later in their last week of being prepared to re-enter Beijing medical society. A week later, with his lower intestine in spasm, one hand missing and his jaw cracked in three places, two soldiers tossed Axl out of a moving Geep at the gates of the English Embassy.

Right idea, wrong place. The English asked so few questions Axl could only assume they recognised him from WarChild and figured he was still legit…

Axl came back to Beijing two months later as someone else. New eyes bought over the web, neatly cut hair, his skin bleached Norwegian White and an arm’s length of off-the-shelf, clone-grown Indian gut spliced into place in his lower abdomen. The man Axl should have killed first time round died in his bed, from a scorpion bite. And across the city, the sad-eyed apologetic doctor and his daughter slept soundly, undisturbed.

That was the way Axl wanted it. The route Black Jack would have taken. So Axl did the job he’d been retained for and did it for free, because he’d missed his kill-by date and that was how contracts went.

Still, best not to remember… Who knew who was listening in?

Axl glanced across the table but the Chinese paralegal had turned into a different saffron-robed figure, sat there also smiling, quietly waiting for Axl’s attention. This boy’s eyes showed up to Axl as light grey, which made them blue or maybe green. He looked like a freshman from some exclusive East Coast college, all ivy leagues and quads. The kind where good SATs alone aren’t good enough. The boy glanced nervously at a screen in the table in front of him and read off his first question.

‘Do you speak Portuguese?’

Axl nodded, shifting on his chair. Any half-decent semiAI could have done the interview better. But then, any half-decent AI would just have got Axl to say something and then run semantics on the result. Even something basic like KnowWho would be able to pin him down to a country, maybe even a particular city. To get his district, background or age took something heavier like SoftSP. The studios in Day Effé had been using that for decades to put accents to v'Actors for their interminable novelets, Axl presumed everyone else did as well.

‘Is Portuguese your main language?’

Axl thought about it, or maybe he just pretended to think, he wasn’t sure. There was a time lag between words and thoughts. And besides, how the fuck did he know what his first language was? He’d been seven before he remembered uttering his first word and that had been muerto.

‘Spanish,’ said Axl.

The young American switched to fractured barrio slang and Axl smiled for the first time in days. He always felt that way in reverse, when he used German.

‘Not my best language,’ the man admitted with a grin, switching back to Portuguese, ‘but Tsongkhapa doesn’t like implants… And I don’t rate using a box…’ He jerked his head towards a BabelFisk translator resting lifeless on the desk. The boy hadn’t even bothered to turn it on.

‘English,’ Axl said slowly. ‘I can do English.’ The words rasped in his throat, broken before they’d even left his mouth… ‘And no, I’m not a war criminal.’

‘Okay,’ the American flipped the screen up off the desk and swivelled it towards Axl. On it was a real-time grab of the interview. ‘Look at the screen,’ said the man and Axl did. In place of the room, words now hovered.

‘Can you read it?’

Axl nodded.

‘Good. Check the words and if they’re true read them aloud, facing the screen. By reciting these words you assert that you’ve not committed a war crime, not been proscribed sanctuary by the UN PaxForce and you are not—in so far as you know—under edict from WorldBank, the IMF or the Human Rights Court at the Hague ...'

The man kept his voice soft, as if worried he might give offence. But underneath the gentleness was the flatness of lines recited hundreds of times before.

Axl swore the oath without hesitation. And in swearing gave up his right to sanctuary if the UN could prove he’d lied.

‘A bridge that travellers walk over, moonlight that cools flames of passion, herbs that cure disease, and sun which illuminates darkness…’ The doctor was reciting something but Axl wasn’t listening, merely watching the way sunlight showed up tiny blonde hairs on her wrist. Not that this was what he saw. Axl got shades of grey bleaching out to white and not even in real 3D either.

The doctor deserved a soft synth loop, something exotic like a late riff or soloing balafon. She didn’t get that either. Too many empty spaces, too much silence.

There’d been other borders to be crossed, years back when the world was a different kind of black and white. Crawling under the wire into besieged Bogotá. Passing through the razor fence surrounding the Cabal, back when the Az virus had just started raging, before towerblocks crumbled and Spanish flu turned Colombia to a mountainous wasteland.

That was professionalism, crawling into a city under siege to kill somebody who was probably going to die anyway. Either that or stupidity. Axl did it though, and got out to rack up that week’s highest ratings and a prize at Cannes. The networks hated that. Seeing freelancers walk away with awards.

The voice that broke through his tumbling memories was patient, soft and understanding. So kind and rational Axl wanted to scream. It was asking him a question. Something he thought it had asked him before.

‘Can you remember your name?’

Axl looked at the doctor who smiled gently.

‘If not, we can always try a DNA match using the composite Red Cross database for Europe. But you know it was logic bombed…’ She caught herself and blushed. When she spoke again it was to say exactly the same thing, but more slowly and using simple words. Which told him all he needed to know about how convincing he looked in his new part.

Axl grinned sourly.

‘Name’s Jack,’ he said, ‘Black Jack Hot. Hell, you’ve probably heard of me?’

Too young to have watched the series first time round and too grown-up now to be interested in the revival, it was obvious she didn’t get the gag. All he saw on her face was pity. Which wasn’t enough to stop Axl pasting the patented shit-eating grin onto his hollow face.

‘Well, too bad, ‘cos you‘re about to…’

For a second, Axl had the hideous feeling she was about to lean across the desk and take his hand.

‘I’m Jane, your doctor,’ she said gently. ‘We’ll be working together to get you back on your feet. Get you back to full health.’

‘Nothing wrong with Black Jack,’ Axl said. ‘He’s fine.’

‘No,’ Jane shook her head. ‘You’ve been beaten up, starved, blinded, tortured…’

His mind only made it to item two on her list.

Starved? Axl stared at his wrist. Sure there was a scar from the implant but what he really noticed was just how thin his wrist was. Paper-fine skin stretched over protruding bone.

‘What’s the date?’ Axl demanded.

‘Thursday 1 September...'

Eight days were gone walkabout. Axl examined his fingers, suddenly realising what he saw. Starvation. Skin pulled so tight over sinew and bone that his knuckles belonged to someone else.

‘Bastards,’ Axl said suddenly. ‘Fucking bastards…’

‘Anger’s good,’ the doctor told him.

He ignored her. That bloody toy on the shuttle… Axl stopped feeling angry, stopped feeling anything and finally listened to his body. His teeth were chattering, muscles strung tight as violin strings in his jaw. All the way down his spine went shivers, syncopated cold waves. He stank so bad he didn’t know how the girl could stand to be in the same room as him.

Not starved, Axl realised, wired to fuck and back. He could taste the residue of cheap amphetamine in his sour saliva. Smell the crystalMeth oozing from his pores. He’d just done the Bollywood Diet. A week asleep while his metabolism ran white hot and his shuddering body rehydrated through feeds in his wrist. The little bastard had burned out his muscles to leave bones rattling in a skin sack.

‘You’ve been chemically tortured,’ Jane said.

‘No,’ Axl said firmly. ‘Beaten up, drugged up, nothing more.’ Hell, he’d been tortured by professionals and that little bastard wasn’t even…

When the small room came back into focus Axl’s hands were shaking and his teeth chattering worse than ever.

Silently the doctor stood up and walked round her desk, heading towards a basin behind him. ‘Water,’ she said, seeing his suspicious glance, ‘run-off from the mountains.’

It was cold enough to bite into the back of his throat and make his already aching head hurt even more. Silently she refilled the glass and gave it back to him. He drank that one down too while she watched. And then, surprisingly, Jane did nothing; almost as if she’d forgotten he was there.

Axl watched while she tapped the top of her desk, elegant fingers dancing over its glass surface to wake icons. Soon the whole surface flickered with floating frames that filled with ever updating lists. It took Axl a minute or so to realise she was checking inventory and ordering fresh drugs for her surgery, something that even the most basic smartbox could have handled in fifteen seconds without anyone being aware it had run the routine.

When she was done, Jane started over, rechecking she’d got her figures right first time round. Then she started rechecking the recheck. Without meaning to, Axl shifted in his seat.

‘Through there,’ the woman said without looking up.

Through there featured a small chrome toilet, the first piece of obviously modern equipment he’d seen since landing. But Axl didn’t have eyes or need for that or the matching glass basin with built in sonic dryer. He was too busy looking at his face in a looking glass, hollow cheeked and flayed by the unflattering glow of a striplight overhead.

It was as well the mirror was dumb. Because Axl could imagine only too well what the one back at his flat in Day Effé would have said had he ever presented himself looking like that. Refried shit was the least of it.

And if the bruising had been only half as bad he’d still have looked worse than terrible. He could have signed on as a Voudun zombie in some horror Sim and the living dead would have complained. Hell, Black Jack would have said he would double no trouble as a drug warning to kids not to ski Ice…

But that was busking it. Deep down inside, Axl knew he just looked ‘fugee-bog-standard issue, from his razor-cut three-millimetre crop designed to keep lice at bay to the standard Red Cross tag punched through his left ear, its hologram shimmering in the overhead light.

The artificial eye feeding him the information stared out from one bruised socket. His other socket was crusted black. And if he’d got back his cheekbones to die for it was because almost dying was how he’d got them back. A ring of puncture wounds ran in neat circles round both temples where someone—read that little shit—had punched SQUID needles through to his brain.

It wasn’t a pretty sight but then Axl was beginning to realise that it wasn’t meant to be. As for that foamBone repair in his forehead ... He could be running straight chips, a half-real/half-augmented splice or even be packed with nothing but the wetware he was born with. Christ alone knew what that little fuck had been doing inside his head up there on the shuttle. Rewiring everything in sight probably.

Jane gave Axl ten minutes of being in front of the mirror by himself before she hit override on the door lock and came in to get him. Her patient wasn’t standing in front of the looking-glass anymore. He was hunched on the floor, legs pulled up and hugged tight to him with his arms, head buried against his knees.

She knew without looking that he was crying. And experience told her he wouldn’t thank her for noticing, they never did. All the same, she pulled Axl to his feet, gave him a sterile tissue and led him back to her tiny surgery.

Jane was twenty-three, six months out of Tel Aviv medical college and this man was the six hundred and thirty-second torture victim she’d seen since arriving. At most, she gave him a forty-sixty chance of surviving as was. Sixty-forty if she took time to patch him up.

So far, she’d cared about each broken human presented to her but common sense and the clinic AI told Jane that her compassion would eventually cut off, though there’d been no sign of it yet. She was exhausted with waiting.

The material on her couch was self-cleaning and the couch itself doubled as scales and most other things besides. Jane read off his weight and made a note to herself with a quick pass of her fingers over the desktop before helping him out of his blood-encrusted shirt and trousers.

Three Spanish coins, a cracked credit chip and three soiled hundred dollar notes rolled together so tight they could be pushed into almost any orifice. There was nothing in his pockets that didn’t fit the standard ‘fugee profile.

He stank worse without his clothes, but that was quite normal. For a minute Jane considered removing the grime and sweat from his skin with a simple dusting of nanites, but rejected the idea. Most ‘fugees were too scared of nanites to want them near. He could shower later, before he picked up replacement clothes.

‘Okay,’ said Jane as she ran her fingers quickly down his front, feeling for scars and swellings. ‘I’m starting the examination now ...' She was talking to the clinic AI. ‘Knife wound to the right chest, looks old. Newer operation scar over lower bowel area. Bullet wound, low-calibre and non-explosive, in through right thigh and out right hip… Relatively recent.’

‘That was five years ago,’ interrupted Axl.

‘Patient heals slowly…’ Jane added it to her observations without pausing. A quick touch to Axl’s shoulder was all it took to make him roll onto his front. ‘Star-shaped cauterisation to right shoulder, not instantly identifiable.’

Axl could have told her that was a holiday souvenir from Belize, ceramic frag from someone else’s home-made pipe bomb, but he didn’t feel like interrupting her again and certainly not to talk about the one time he got really sloppy. His WarChild contract had been running out then and he’d missed a simple trip wire slung across the entrance to a deserted holiday hotel. Three-quarters of Axl’s input to that episode had involved him getting shipped to a field hospital outside San Porto. His personal rating had dropped eleven points.

‘Liver, both kidneys…’ Her hand slipped casually between his buttocks, cupping his balls. ‘Both testicles, one new…’ She nodded to herself, made another note, revising the odds upwards. Having both kidneys was good, if surprising.

Running her fingers up the man’s spine to check each vertebra, her finger reached his skull and then found the grey ceramic plug, recessed into its mounting and level with his skin…

‘Shit…’ She bent close, so close that Axl could feel her blonde hair brush his shoulder, soft as angel’s breath. ‘They spiked you…’

She was shocked.

Really shocked.

Axl twisted his head to look up into blue eyes made enormous by tears and pity. And despite himself, he smiled. No one came close to the Cardinal when it came to pre-planning and detail.