Version 43

by Philip Palmer

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

The Exodus Universe. Your odds of surviving quantum teleportation are, more or less, fifty/fifty. The only ones crazy enough to try it are the desperate, the insane, and those sentenced to exile for their crimes. Belladonna is home to the survivors of the fifty/fifty -- and is therefore a planet run by criminals and thieves. But when a horrific and improbable murder catches the attention of the Galactic Police force, one cyborg cop -- Version 43 -- is sent to investigate. Version 43 has been here before and has old friends and older enemies lying in wait. The cop was human once, but now, he is more program than man and will find a way to clean up this planet once and for all.

Release date: October 28, 2010

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 525

Sample

I was in a cheerful mood. The sky was a rich blue. The twelve moons of Belladonna shone, it seemed to me, like globes on a
Christmas tree in the daytime sky. I could smell heliotropes, growing in banks beside the moving walkways, and orchids and
lilies and peonies growing in baskets that hovered above the pedestrian boulevard.


I was one day old. I would, my database warned me, grow more jaded with the passage of time. But for the moment, life felt
good.


It was a short walk from the spaceport to the crime scene. I was in constant subvocal contact with the Sheriff, Gordon Heath,
and the crime-scene photos scrolled in front of my eyes as I walked. But the air was fresh, and the heliotropes and the orchids
and the lilies and the peonies were fragrant, as were the roses and the summer lilacs and cut grass in the parkland that led
off the boulevard. A woman was sunbathing naked on the grass, and I registered her distant beauty, and felt a faint stirring
of remembered regret.


Then I walked on, another five blocks. Most of the citizens were using the moving walkways, twin rivers on either side of
the pedestrian thoroughfare. Flybikes and flying cars zoomed above me, rather lower than was prudent or indeed (I checked
this on my database) legal. The Belladonnans, I noted, dressed soberly but elegantly. Many of the men had grey or black waistcoats
and ornate buckled belts and armoured jackets. The women tended to wear long silver or gold or scarlet dresses and high-heeled
boots, apart from the courtesans who wore jewelled gowns.


“I’m Sheriff Heath.”

“I’m aware of your identity,” I said. I was now at the crime scene, and I filtered out my olfactory sensations to focus on
the case.


“Pleased to meet you too,” the Sheriff chided, and I registered the hint of irony but decided it would be politic to ignore
it.


The Sheriff and I were standing outside a twelve-storey hotel made of black brick. Police officers had cordoned off the area
with holos proclaiming POLICE and MURDER SCENE – KEEP AWAY. The citizens on the moving walkways gawped at the sight, secretly
thrilled (or so I posited) at the glimpse of a terror that had passed them by.


“Sheriff, feel free to call me Luke,” I added, in a belated attempt to build a rapport.

In fact, “Luke” was not and never had been my name.

“Sure, I’ll do that. ‘Luke’.”

This time, there was open scorn in the lawman’s tone, but I chose to ignore that subtextual nuance also.

Sheriff Heath, I noted, looked shockingly old – too old perhaps for cosmetic rejuve? – though his body was fit and strong.
He was bald, heavily wrinkled, with a grey walrus moustache and peering blue eyes. I had been impressed at the diverse range
of his bio: soldier, pirate, artist, scientist and bartender. Now, he was Sheriff of the Fourth Canton of Lawless City.


“Through here.”

The holograms of the crime scene didn’t do justice to its horror. Blood and human flesh spattered the walls and ceilings.
A screaming severed head swam in a pool of blood on the bed. And inside the mouth, which gaped unnaturally large, was a human
heart, squeezed and squirted. It was evident that multiple murders had occurred, and that the killings had all been frenzied.


I switched on my decontam forcefield and hovered back and forth a centimetre above the ground. I used my finger-tweezers to
take samples of blood and flesh, and carefully counted and collated the scattered limbs and organs in order to make a tally
of the corpses. (Final count: five, of which two were male, three female.) The chaotic dispersal of body parts at this crime
scene was far from typical: I found two legs and all five livers in the wardrobe and a pair of hands and six eyes underneath
the floor panels in the kitchen, and the entrails of all the corpses were enmeshed and interconnected to form effectively a vast colon.
In addition, one set of lungs had fallen under the bed.


At one point I glanced behind, and was startled to see that the Sheriff was pale and looked nauseous.

“Murder weapon?” I asked.

“We found nothing. We don’t know what could have done this.”

“Plasma beam? Samurai sword?”

“Look closer.”

I looked closer. I’d assumed that the heart in the mouth of the severed head on the bed had been inserted by a psychopathic
ritual killer. But an eyeball-tomograph told me that the heart was actually occupying the space normally reserved for a tongue,
and was organically connected to the throat. I took pinprick microsamples and analysed the DNA, and found that the DNA in
the head’s staring eyeballs didn’t match the DNA of the head itself, and neither was a match for the heart. I then performed
a dissection of the heart, and found, inside it –


– an erect penis.

For the first time in many years, I wished I could desire to vomit.

“What is this?” I marvelled.


“Our best guess,” said the Sheriff. “These bodies were quantum teleported, and got jumbled up along the way. That’s why we
called you in. A quantum teleport weapon, we ain’t never hearda such a thing. So we reckoned, must be banned technology, your
kinda can of worms.”


“Amongst other things. Do we have any idea who these victims are?”

“I recognise this one,” the Sheriff said, gesturing at the severed staring head.

“Who is it?”

“It’s my son,” the Sheriff said, barely a quaver in his voice.

I processed that fact for a few moments, and decided not to comment on the horrific coincidence.

“His name?”


“Alexander. Alexander Heath. We didn’t get on so well. He was a stubborn bastard, just like me.”

“Enemies?”

“Just me.”

“What gang did he work for?”

“He was clean. He was a doctor at the City Hospital. Two convictions for violence as a boy, but they were gang-related mano a manos, and since then, he’s lived the pure life.”


“What about you? Do you have enemies?”

“None. I’m corrupt as hell. No one could fall out with me.”

I processed this too; it tallied with all my data. I nodded.

“I’ve identified two men, including your son, and three women. Could they be colleagues?” I asked.

“Worth checking out.”

I checked it out, cross-referencing the DNA of the corpses against the City Hospital personnel records.

“They’re all medics,” I said, a few seconds later. “In addition to your son, the corpses are: Andrei Pavlovsky, Jada Brown,
Sara Limer, Fliss Hooper. Know them?”


“Fliss was my son’s girl. Pretty as hell. He thought I was hitting on her; that was one of our fallings out.”

“Were you?”

“In my dreams. She was a looker.”

“Did you love your son?”

“Oh yes.”

I felt an emotion inside myself, and identified it, and marvelled at its richness and its power:

It was Rage.



Lawless City had a real name: Bompasso. After John Bompasso, one of the three creators of cute-o, the Quantum Theory of Everything.


No one ever called it that.

It was a city built on hills, and riddled with rivers – five of them, intertwining like rats’ tails – and dominated by black-stoned
towering buildings decorated with jewelled carvings by master artisans. Many of the buildings teetered precariously on thin
pillars, or even floated above the ground. It was forcefield architecture at its most inspired: the marble and the stone were
clad over a diagrid of unyielding nothingness.


I had, my database told me, visited this city three times before. Once I had been ambushed by desperadoes and killed. The
second time I had arrested and then executed those desperadoes. And on my last visit, I had successfully smashed the entire
crime cartel. Four gang bosses had been killed, eleven more had been brain-fried. A democratic government had been appointed,
and incorruptible cyborg judges had been placed in charge of the criminal justice system. And an army of street cops were
hired to enforce the rule of law.


That was a hundred years ago. Now, the gangs were back in charge. The dons were all new immigrants, with souls seared by frequent
brain-frying on one of the Home Planets. They were ruthless, hungry, and full of dangerous exhilaration at having survived
the fifty-fifty.


It was a wretched state of affairs, but I didn’t feel even a twinge of despair at the prospect of working on such a planet.

For I had expunged Despair from my circuits long ago, considering it to be a purposeless and dispiriting emotion. Instead,
I felt Excitement at the challenge ahead. I would solve this crime; and when I had solved the crime, I would solve all the
other crimes that I might happen to stumble across. I would restore peace and justice to Bompasso.


Then I would leave, and peace would reign for a while.

And then, after a slightly longer while, the violence would return. And Bompasso would once again be known as Lawless City.



“This is your hotel,” said the Sheriff, and I craned my neck.


“Which room?”

“Any room. It’s yours. It’s fully staffed.”

I continued to stare up at the hotel. It was a double bay-fronted mansion decorated with gold-inlaid sgraffito and ruby bosses,
set in the ubiquitous black stone. It shimmered like a rainbow that has snared a pot of gold.


“I don’t need a whole hotel.”

“It’s yours. You’re our guest.”

“I don’t even sleep. I just need a socket to plug myself in to at night.”

“You recharge?”


“I’m kidding. I don’t recharge. My batteries never run out. I kid, sometimes.”

“Remember to warn me.”

“I will, Sheriff.”

“We’ve given you hologram facilities. You can speak to anyone you like anywhere on the planet.”

“I don’t like holograms. I prefer to interview suspects in the flesh.”

“Flesh?”

“I’m still kidding.”

“Ho, forgive my hilarity, ho. Did they ever tell you—?”

“I’m not at liberty to answer personal questions.”

“So they didn’t, huh.” The Sheriff grinned, knowingly, with a hint of condescension.

I was used to this kind of treatment from living humans. I had once analysed the reasons for it, and had recorded my conclusion
on my database: humans like to think they are better than cyborgs, despite being, in every relevant specification, less efficient, less effective,
and inferior.


“My personality,” I explained gently, “is a template for my consciousness. It really doesn’t matter who used to own it.”


“I can’t imagine—”

“What?”

“Living on in a robot body. Forever.”


“My personality does not live on. The human I used to be is dead. It’s me now. Just me.”

“Yeah. The hotel door is set to your codes. Just give it a hard stare, it’ll let you in.”

“I need to start interviewing.”

“Who? We have no suspects.”

“We have a city full of suspects, Sheriff. I want to get to know them all.”



This was a city of high and low tenements, narrow alleys, cluttered side-streets, and tall, magnificent, needle-like soaring
spires. There were no churches in Lawless City, and no religion. But the spires were the homes of the city’s ancien régime, the original Founders. A hundred spires loomed high over the city’s affairs, brushing the soft pink clouds of this small
and once-arid planet.


I hired a flybike to carry me across the city. In the distance, like sentries guarding the horizons, were red mountains and
vast savannahs of yellow dust dotted with meadows of vividly green grass.


I wove a path through the sky-scraping spires and looming tenement blocks of the black-stoned city. And then I landed in the
vehicle park of the City Hospital.


The hospital was the key to it, I had decided.

All five victims had worked at this hospital: therefore, I theorised, all five victims must have been involved in a medical
fraud. The fraud went wrong, the expected profit targets were not met, and the poor dumb fraudsters were eliminated by the
evil gang boss who had conceived the whole enterprise. That was my working hypothesis.


This still left the mystery of how the medics had been killed: I assigned a subroutine to worry away at that.


My primary consciousness, however, focused on finding the motive, method and opportunity for the underlying fraud, which would
then allow me to draw up a list of the most likely suspects for the murders.


Medical fraud of course meant organ theft or rejuve theft. What else could it be? I was aware that Belladonna had an appallingly
inefficient medical system: some citizens waited decades for rejuve therapy or organ and limb replacement. The rich lived
for ever on this planet, but the poor had to steal to get money to jump the clinical queue, even in cases of dire medical
emergency.


As a consequence there was, my database informed me, a shockingly high true-death rate on Belladonna. On Earth it was rare
for more than ten or eleven people to true-die a year, out of a population of two point three billion. On Belladonna, by contrast,
there were more than five hundred thousand true-deaths a year, out of a population of eight hundred and fifty million.


This created, I concluded, the ideal conditions for a black market in stolen body parts.

My database reminded me of a case on Calabria where hospital patients suffering minor digestive ailments were sedated, and
had their eyes and genitalia removed. The traumatised victims had to wait nearly twenty years before they could receive the
intensive rejuve therapy that allowed their missing organs to grow back.


I strode swiftly out of the vehicle park, entered via the hardglass door into the hospital reception, then moved swiftly past
the robot porters. And I marvelled at how patiently the crowds of citizens were waiting to be seen.


I went through four levels of security until I was admitted to the large and oddly deserted administration office. There I
spoke to the deputy hospital manager in charge of admissions, who was named Macawley – just Macawley – in her holo-walled
office that offered a dazzling animated array of angry rock stars.


Macawley looked younger than her actual age which, my database informed me, was twenty-five. She was a genetically engineered wild-looking girl with claws instead of fingernails.
She wore a silver bodysuit, tightly fitting, with green flashes on the arms and breasts to match her green eyes. I considered
her to be rather eerie. She smiled at me tentatively. After .05 of a second had elapsed, I realised she was afraid of me.


“Your name is Macawley. You are the DHMICA,” I said.

“Yes, that’s me,” she said, and the tentative smile was now just an anxious twitch of the lip.

“Hello Macawley. I believe that you were born on this planet. Your mother was transported after being convicted on capital
charges, she died when you were five, you are estranged from your stepfather, Ron Barclay, who is a drug dealer,” I told her,
chattily, attempting to put her at her ease.


“Yes – how did you – fuck, I know how you knew that! You have a database?”

“I’m just guessing,” I said, with an attempt at humour. The fear flickered in those green eyes again.

“It’s a nice planet,” I volunteered.

“Is it?”

“I’ve been to many. This is nice. Too much desert, though. There’s one place I’ve been to—”

I stopped talking. Macawley was virtually spasming with anxiety. “I’m here to enforce the law,” I pointed out. “You have no
need to fear me.”


“No?”

“No.”

“They say you’re a cold killer,” Macawley said, and I stifled an emotion: Scorn.

“Maybe I am,” I told her softly, and touched her hand with my robot fingers. She didn’t flinch, nor did she shove my hand
away.


“Look at these photographs,” I told her, and with my eyes I projected images of the five dead medics into the air in front
of her.


“I’m looking.”


“Do you know them?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Answer the question.”

“Yes I do know them.”

“Who are they?”

“I’m not telling you that, unless you tell me why you want to—”

I interrupted: “This is a murder investigation.”

She blinked.

“They’re dead?”

“Yes.”

“All of them?”

“Yes.”

“Murdered?”

“Yes.”

A strange look came over her face: I identified it as Shock.

“They—” she said, and cleared her throat. “They all worked here. Three of them were doctors – Dr Alexander Heath, Dr Fliss
Hooper, Dr Sara Limer. Jada Brown and Andrei Pavlovsky were nurses.”


“What were they like?”

“They were—” She cleared her throat again, vigorously, and continued: “They were like doctors, except the ones who were, duh!
like nurses.” Her tone was snide, but I overlooked it.


“Did they live extravagantly?”

“How would I know?”

“Did you see them socially?”

“I knew, um, Dr Hooper – Fliss Hooper. She, um… I knew her pretty well.”

I checked my database of Belladonnan hotel and restaurant receipts. “She was your girlfriend,” I asserted.

Macawley wiped away a tear.

“What makes you think that?” she said, in a terrified whisper.

“You ate in nice restaurants with her, fairly often, on average two-point-five times a month. You went on holiday together, on quite a number of occasions, seven in all in the last six years.
And you purchased good-quality champagne once a year on or around the same date, which I presume was the anniversary of you
two becoming a sexually active couple.”


Macawley stared at me. Then she spoke angrily, in what sounded to me very like a snarl: “You are such a fucking creepier-than-creepy
fucking creep! She was my friend! Not my fucking—”


“The data,” I pointed out, “is consistent with—”

“Friend, get it? Not lover. Not even fuckbuddy. We were pals.” Macawley was becoming hysterical. I reminded myself that the brutal death and dismemberment of a close friend was liable,
in many emotionally inclined humans, to lead to trauma and distress.


“Very well,” I said mildly. “I concede that I may have interpreted the data wrongly. So let us postulate that you were indeed
friends, not lovers. But would it be fair to say, ‘close friends’?”


Macawley stared. “Yeah.”

“So what else can you tell me about her?”

“Nothing! Everything.” Macawley wiped away another tear. Then another. Then suddenly the tears had gone and her voice was
cold. “How long have you got? She loved TV, we both did. We had our favourite shows, all the wild ones, Death Girls, Xandra, Witch World. We went to TV cons together. She liked red wine, so did I, especially Chateau Nova, the syrah and the pinot noir. We shared good times and bad. And we drank, not too much but we knew how to fucking—Look, I married an evil
charming-bastard-that-dumb-girls-fall-for kind of guy, okay am I perfect? No! So – fuck – skip it, you wouldn’t – he was violent,
the prick, I left him. And so – I’m sorry, I’m rambling – what I’m trying to say is – that’s why Fliss and I drank champagne.
Every year, on the anniversary of the day I ditched the fucking jerk.”


“Ah.”

“Any other bits of my life you’d like to filthily dabble in?”


“Who could have killed her?” I asked.

“How the fuck should I know?”

“Will you help me find her killers?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

She looked at me with contempt. “Because this is Belladonna,” she explained, with more scorn than I had ever encountered before in a human’s voice.


“That’s a defeatist attitude,” I advised her, and she glared more contempt at me.

I wondered if I could have handled this interview differently.

I came to no conclusion.

“This is what you will do,” I told her curtly.

“I’m busy.”

“This is not optional. Do you have a camera?”

“What does ‘not optional’ mean, tin man?”

“It means it’s a criminal offence to hinder a Galactic Police Officer in the performance of his duties. Also, your friend
was just murdered and you ought to help me find the killer.”


Macawley winced.

“You just had to ask nicely,” she muttered sulkily.

“No, I do not have to ask nicely,” I explained. “I do not even have to ask, I am authorised to order citizens to do what I
need them to do, promptly and efficiently. Remember, there are sanctions for non-compliance, and the fines can really add up. Now: get your camera. Patrol the wards. Every single one. Send me the images. Look in my eyes.”


“No.”

“Look.”

“No!”

“Look.”

She looked. Her green eyes flickered then fixed as she stared into my empty black pupils, and I downloaded my access codes
into her mind.


“Subvocalise GPC453, and the images will reach me. It’s a secure line.”


“Did you just enter my brain?”

“Your brainchip. Not your brain. I can’t read thoughts. Just brainchips.”

Macawley shuddered, and the look she gave me would have curdled water.

I leaned over the desk, and she flinched; our cheeks were so close I could smell her skin.

Then I put out my arm and accessed the hospital’s computer system with a handtouch on her desk databox. I downloaded all its
data, and transmitted an authorisation for a full audit of all the hospital’s medical and financial records. I then reviewed
the hospital database of all Patient Admissions in the last five years. It took me almost ten minutes to process this information.
During this time, I stared blankly into space, while Macawley fidgeted and twitched, clearly longing to leave her desk but
afraid to do so.


In those ten minutes, after accessing the personal emails and MI conversations of every member of hospital staff, I learned
that Alexander Heath had been in love with Fliss Hooper. I also learned that she had become pregnant with his baby, and had
opted to have the fertilised egg removed and placed in storage.


The Sheriff would have a grandchild one day. I wondered if I should subvoc this information across to him, but decided that
lay outside my remit.


Fliss Hooper, I learned, had been a pretty, clever and entertaining young woman. I watched, in my mind’s eye, office-party
footage of her dancing. Her eyes leaped out across at me, and impaled me with their energy. I, too, had once known—


I refocused my thoughts, and assimilated social networking and other personal data about the life of Alexander Heath. I registered
that this had been a young man of exceptional promise. He had loved Fliss very much indeed: this was recorded in detail in a large number of inter-office emails and subvocs, and several elegant and touching poems that I retrieved from his encrypted
file vault. One of these poems dealt with—


I had all the data I needed. I logged off.

“You may go,” I told Macawley, and she twitched, and then fled.

I made my way out of the administration block, and down into the basement of the hospital. At every level, I was stopped by
security guards, and obliged to holo-project my warrant of authority. It was, I would have thought, fairly obvious I was a Galactic Cop since I am six foot five with plastic skin and dead eyes, and there were no other cyborgs on the entire
planet.


However, I had to admire these citizens’ devotion to mindless bureaucracy. It was one of the few encouraging signs of civilisation
I had encountered here.


Finally, I reached the lower depths of the hospital, where the organ banks for the entire city were housed. Microcameras tracked
me, and I was aware of each and every one of them. A pair of sullen guards glared as I passed them, shrouded in my holo-warrant.


I passed through the final security door, and closed it loudly behind me. I surveyed the scene:

Kilometre upon kilometre of corridors ran beneath the hospital, in every direction. And each corridor was stacked high with
hardglass vats containing limbs, hearts, livers, kidneys, eyes, intestines, oesophaguses, ovaries, penises, skeletons, and
whole-body skins.


I walked down one corridor and surveyed and counted and classified the body parts; then I counted the corridors, and was moderately
impressed by the scale of this storage facility. There were enough organs and limbs and skins here to replace the bodies of
at least thirty thousand people; all of them grown from foetal tissue and ready for transplant. For this was a dangerous planet,
and rejuve was a slow healer.


And yet, I mused, even this wasn’t enough. Dozens of citizens true-died every day because they’d had to wait too long for a heart or a liver or new lungs. And the death toll from duels
and random murders was staggering.


I checked the inventories I had downloaded into my database, and cross-collated them against the organs I was walking past.
It took me two days in all to walk/hover the whole length and width of this underground labyrinth. I checked the contents
of every vat in every corridor and every alcove; I even smashed through sheer rock walls with my fist to check for hidden
organ vats, but found none. Then I transmitted a message to the works department to make the necessary repairs, citing the
grid references to aid them.


At the end of this long search, I had found no discrepancies or unexplained losses. There was therefore no prima facie evidence
of organ or skin theft.


I decided to explore the possibility that the hospital’s computer records had been falsified.

However, after a detailed analysis of the records of Admissions and Surgical Procedures, I found no anomalies, or evidence
of data-tampering. Furthermore, I determined that none of the dead medics had any recorded connections with organised crime
figures. None of them had been receiving large money transfers from covert untraceable accounts; nor did any of them have
expenditure patterns that were inconsistent with their income flows.


My organ-fraud hypothesis was accordingly downgraded.

Was there some other reason for the killings?

I could think of none.

Which meant, I concluded, that I had no notion whatsoever about the motive behind the murders.

I took to the streets again. I programmed my flybike to return to my hotel without me, and walked across town to the Black
Saloon. It was a vast bar, with tables on the sidewalks and oval keyhole windows that made it resemble a castle abandoned
by its defending bowmen.


A chef was cooking burgers on the outdoor griddle, and some of the regulars looked as if they had been there for days on end.
It was, after all, a pleasant spot. It rarely rained, and there were no cold winds on Belladonna, just warm summer zephyrs
bearing the scent of flowers.


I walked inside and sat at a bar stool. I glanced around and admired the mosaic floors and the garishly nude statue-pillars,
and smelled the booze and the bodies of the drinkers, and remembered the taste of beer.


“What can I get you?” asked the woman at the bar. She was a black-haired, dark-skinned, stunningly beautiful woman with a
single brow and lips that hinted at a smile.


“Information.”

“You’re a Galactic Cop?”

“Do I look like a Cop?”

“Six foot five? No manners? Plastic skin?”

“I’m a Cop,” I sighed.

“How’s that feel?”

“I’m old. And very smart. And I will never ever die. It feels – I have no view on how it feels.”

“Yeah? You know, tin man, you are one sorry son of a fucking bitch,” said the barmaid, and grinned. It was, I noted, a superior
kind of a grin. I was being patronised once again.


“So,” the barmaid added, in more friendly tones, “what’s your poison?”

Suddenly, I found myself overwhelmed by waves of melancholia.

It alarmed me severely. In the usual course of things, my emotions were carefully calibrated to assist the functioning of
my cybernetic intellect. My slowly shifting moods enhanced ratiocination, allowed me to access “gut instinct,” and enabled
me to make lateral leaps of deductive brilliance. And hence, I valued my emotions, for I knew they served a useful function
and made me more than just a machine.


But this – this! This – black, dark, void, empty – no word for it! – this ghastly self-loathing feeling – what function could it possibly serve? What did it mean? What did it—


Swiftly, I erased Melancholy from my emotional repertoire.