Part 13 (1/2)
”That's even more special than I would have imagined.” She put Taliaferro's face up on the monitor wall. ”You have a record of me hanging around here talking to myself?”
”At least this time I have a record of you,” Taliaferro said genially. ”I've put in a requisition for better hardware and software.”
”By the time you get it, we'll both have retired,” Konstantin said.
”Optimist.”
”It's all right,” she told him. ”I have another source in mind. I'm disconnecting for real again. Got to make a phone call, and I don't want to do it from here.”
The arms dealer's real name was Ross -- one name, official -- and she was not amused.
Konstantin had to admit to herself that she wouldn't have been, either, if the detective who had arrested her for counterfeiting had called to demand favors while all of her worldly possessions were being inventoried and evaluated for payment of fines. But neither did the woman hang up on her, and that was probably good, Konstantin thought.
”I design -- designed -- weapons,” the arms dealer said. Like many people, she had chosen an AR face that had been an idealized version of herself. Over the telephone screen, she was a bit rougher and larger, with a hint of a double chin, short, bristly hair, and smaller, sadder eyes. Still, Konstantin could see the resemblance. ”I'm not much for doodling software for its own sake. Besides, I thought you were such a whiz. Canoodling being your metier, or whatever it was you told me. Big code freak, I thinkit was? Crooked cop.”
”We've got a lot more lat.i.tude in AR,” Konstantin said, ”though I'd bet that'll change before the year is out.”
”Until then, I'm sure you'll put it to good use,” the arms dealer said sourly. ”Against dangerous criminals like me.”
”Starting over won't be easy under any circ.u.mstances,” Konstantin said. ”But it can be less hard if someone means well for you, especially if it's someone who arrested you.”
”So you said.” The arms dealer nodded. ”But then you keep saying you can't promise anything, and I don't see why I should try to help you out when there's no guarantee.”
”That's exactly what will work in your favor,” Konstantin told her. ”That you helped me out knowing I couldn't guarantee anything.”
”Yeah, I'm sure that the DA will melt under the knowledge that I've actually got this out-of-the-goodness-of-my-heart template. No one would believe, for one moment, that I helped you out in the desperate hope of getting some t.i.t for my tat. After all, it's not like this is some stupid AR set-up scenario, is it.”
Konstantin put her elbow on her desk and rested her chin on her fist. ”OK. I'll promise you something.”
The arms dealer's smile was sour. ”Thought so.”
”While I'd like to promise that things could get easier for you, the only thing I can actually guarantee is that nothing will get any harder than it has to be. There's still a certain amount of lat.i.tude out here in the real world for things like leniency, and it's better to have a cop owe you a favor rather than vice versa.”
The woman's sour expression deepened. ”Things can get rougher, too, can't they? As well as easier.”
”Well, sometimes things get rougher simply by just staying the same, don't they?” Konstantin said, not unkindly.
Now the arms dealer's face was stony. ”I find it hard to believe that someone like you would really like Renaissance festivals.”
”The best part about not being in AR,” Konstantin said evenly, ”is that you don't have to stay in character.”
The arms dealer surprised her by bursting into hearty laughter. ”Oh, don't you?”
”How many ways do I have to say it?” asked Susannah Ell impatiently. ”Dervish is digital. Digital Dervish.”
Her new virtual studio was smaller, and there were fewer a.s.sistants buzzing around her. Konstantin could tell they weren't from the same template as her previous set. These looked less finished in some way, lacking a lot of the smaller details -- freckles, slightly uneven skin tones, irregular fingers -- that had made the other ones look true to life. Or truer, anyway.
”If you really believe this,” Konstantin said, ”I'm surprised that you would deliberately ignore what we told you and open up another studio in AR.”
Ell stood back from the dressmaker's dummy she had been pinning cloth to, considered for a moment, and then shook her head. ”Wipe it,” she said, and the material vanished. ”Yeah, some studio.”
She gestured vaguely as she went over to Konstantin, who was standing near a table piled high with bolts and remnants. She had been surrept.i.tiously feeling the various materials between her fingers and marveling at how authentic the textures were. ”It's a cookie-cutter s.p.a.ce in a cookie-cutter brownstone and I don't like to think what I'm paying for it. I had it made before. Rent-controlled loft downtown, all my a.s.sistants broken in the way I like them. This set -- I don't know how they get away with renting out this paper doll c.r.a.p. But it functions, and that is the acceptable minimum, because the people whocontracted for my summer line don't care what happened to me. They can't care. They can't afford to.
There has to be a line of clothing, or I'm just out. And once you're out in this business, officer, you never get back in. I'd end up tailoring smocks for theme park employees. That's not what I had in mind for my life.”
”But if Dervish is, uh, digital,” Konstantin said, frowning, ”he can just destroy everything again.
Can't he?”
”I'm insured this time,” Ell told her. ”It's all fractally contained. That's why everything's so cramped. If Dervish blows me up again, I can simply pick up where I left off with the next level of regress. It's not perfect, of course, because you have to go in and dither for any fine detail that gets lost, but it should get me through this season. After that, I hope you will have caught him, or stopped him, or erased him, or--”
”Please.” Konstantin put up her hands. ”Look. I know that you're an educated person. And I know that you must have a certain amount of perception, so I don't think I'm telling you anything when I say that I just don't believe that Hastings Dervish has transmogrified, or however you want to put it, into a digital...” she floundered briefly. ”Ent.i.ty.”
Ell stared at her blankly.
”Right?” prompted Konstantin. ”You know I don't believe that's what's happened here. And you must also know that I don't really understand how you can believe that.”
Ell's blank expression began to harden slowly into one of hostility. ”I didn't think this came down to a matter of what you believe.”
Konstantin managed not to groan out loud. ”What I mean is that the situation you describe is impossible.”
”You saw the ruins of my studio. Are you telling me that didn't really happen because it's impossible?”
”No, no, no,” Konstantin said quickly. ”The destruction of your studio happened, of course it did.
I mean Hastings Dervish cannot possibly have become a -- a program. A digital being.”
”What do you want to call it?” Ell asked her, gathering her hair around herself for comfort. Even the hair wasn't as long and thick as before, nor as active. ”I'm just an end-user, I don't get intimate with data. But let me ask you this: if you don't believe Dervish is digital, and I don't believe Dervish is digital, what does it mean if Dervish believes it?”
”You should come out of there,” Taliaferro told her as she boarded the sub-oceanic bullet train for lowdown Hong Kong.
”I've been in and out so many times already today that I've got serious reality-lag,” Konstantin said, handing a coupon to the elfin steward waiting just inside the car. This train was mid-twentieth-century s.p.a.ce Age rather than Jules Verne and there was something melancholy about it.
Perhaps it was the fact that the s.p.a.ce Age future had never materialized, and all the s.h.i.+ny-happy looked a bit naive and pathetic from the perspective of the present, AR notwithstanding. Or maybe, Konstantin thought, she just didn't like s.h.i.+ny-happy and she did like Jules Verne.
”All the more reason to come out,” Taliaferro said.
”You sound worried.” She settled down in a first-cla.s.s seat and managed not to squirm as it molded itself to accommodate her. No one sat next to her. In AR, no one ever sat next to you in First Cla.s.s unless you asked specifically. But, as in real life, you paid extra for the privilege.
”I am. It's a filthy, thankless job but somebody oughta be. You're heading right back into Dervish country.”
”Heard from our friend the arms dealer yet?” Konstantin flicked on the screen in the arm of her seat and began paging through the special catalog offers. Accessories were big again.
”You're putting an awful lot of faith in a total stranger,” Taliaferro said. ”I really don't understand why you think she can come up with something to s.h.i.+eld you from Dervish's tricks.”
”The Smith and Wesson was completely undetectable,” Konstantin said. ”I had to get her to strip off the modifications just to make sure.” ”That was an inanimate object.”
”So is a persona, really. In here, it's all data. Varied configurations and permutations, but there's no real difference. Digital is digital is digital.”
”Then you should wait to see what your arms dealer comes up with. If she comes up with anything.”