The last time I saw Ginger, she was sporting two breasts instead of three. Personally, I thought her breasts were perfect before, but I know that with some guys you could never have too much of a good thing.
When I stepped out of the shower, she was sitting there on the edge of my bed, decked out in a silky red number with a slit up the side that showed plenty of her long legs and a plunging neckline that definitely revealed too much of a good thing. Steam wafted out from the bathroom and rose from my bare skin. I was naked except for the towel around my waist. Outside my tinted floor-to-ceiling window, a constant swarm of Versatian hoverpods hummed and whizzed past, everybody in a hurry to get somewhere on a planet where everybody supposedly came so they didn’t have to hurry.
“I need your help,” she said.
No hello. No how have you been. No sorry for breaking your heart, emptying your credit account, and taking off with your ship and your entire twentieth-century holodisc collection. The last time I saw her, I was stepping into a shower. Now, five years later, I stepped out of one and there she was.
“You have a strange sense of irony,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Never mind. How’d you get in here?”
She shrugged. “Bribed the desk clerk. I’m pretty sure he thought I was a hooker.”
“You are a hooker,” I said.
She made a tsk-tsk sound. “That was another life. I’m a respectable woman now—married to one of the richest stepdock manufacturers in the known universe. And you can kindly stop staring at my breasts, thank you very much. It’s not that uncommon.”
“Sorry. You know, I am working here. I didn’t ask for you to barge in on me.”
“You’re working? In a place like this?”
“I’m checking the security system for the hotel.”
“Ah,” she said, and waved her hand dismissively. “Since when does Dexter Duff stoop to grunt work like that?”
“A lot of things have changed since you ran out on me, Ginger.”
She made a pouty face, sticking out her lower lip and making her eyes wide. In the old days, I found that look irresistible. Now it just looked childish, which was probably what it was all along. “Oh, dear,” she said, “you sound bitter. I was hoping that was all water over the bridge.”
“Under the bridge,” I said.
“Whatever. Look, if you want to take me to bed, let’s do it, and then we’ll get all the tension out of the air.”
“You just said you were married!”
She shrugged. “It’s not like he’d care. He doesn’t care about anything any more. That’s part of the problem.”
“Oh, I feel so sorry for you. Let me get you a Repsiter harp and you can earn some tokens down on the tramspace.”
She sighed and stood, smoothing out her dress. “Look, are we going to do it or not?”
“I’d rather lay down with a pair of blood-sucking Mornala tree worms. At least they have some emotions, even if it’s just fear and no-fear. That’s more than I can say for you.”
“I bet if you drop that towel,” she said, “we’d find out you really think otherwise. There’s some things a man can’t hide.”
I snorted derisively and headed for the built-ins, the drawers sliding out of the wall before I got there. The tile floor felt cold against my bare feet. I dressed quickly, mostly because I was afraid my body was going to betray me despite my best intentions. My towel slid off before I’d managed to get my pants all the way on, giving her a damn good view of everything I had to offer. Or didn’t.
“God, what happened to you?” she said.
It took me a moment to realize she meant the scars. “You know my line of work, Ginger.”
“Yeah, but you never looked like that back then.”
I slipped the shirt over my head and straightened the collar. “I was younger back then. These days, I don’t always manage to duck when I should be ducking or dodge when I should be dodging.”
“Maybe you should get into another line of work,” she said.
“Maybe you slither back under whatever rock you came out from under,” I replied.
I glared at her. She looked back with her practiced look of placid bemusement, like she was humoring a small child. Still glaring at her, I hand-printed the safe next to my bed, pulled out on my laser pistol, and checked to make sure it was fully charged. It was. Then I checked to see if her expression had changed upon seeing me holding a weapon. She still looked at me like I was a two-year-old. I slipped on my shoulder holster and placed the pistol in it, then donned my leather jacket and my boots. Only when I started toward the outside door did she finally speak up.
“All right,” she said, “I’ll tell you what I want.”
I stopped, not yet turning around. “You know, no matter what you tell me, I’m not going to help you.”
“Even if I paid you?”
“Especially if you paid me.”
“Even if I paid you an awful lot?”
“Even… Even then.”
My hesitation had only been for a second, long enough to think about the sad state of my credit account and all the freeze-dried food cubes that had served as meals the past few months, a moment of weakness that lasted no longer than a blink of an eye, but she sensed it like a spider senses a twitch in its web.
“Darling,” she said, her heels clicking on the tile floor, her voice drawing nearer, “you do understand that I am a very rich woman now. I can afford to pay you ten times your normal fee.”
“I wouldn’t do it for twenty.”
“Then I guess I better make it twenty-five.”
I had no idea what she wanted me to do, or whether I’d be willing to do it once I found out what it was, but even a small job would have to be a lot of money. I’d been trying to get my act together for quite a while, and there was always something that set me back. Usually that something involved a trip to a medical ward. This could have finally gotten me my own ship. Maybe even a couple of robots to take care of the small stuff.
She touched me on the shoulder. I tensed.
“Duff,” she whispered, “was it really all that bad?”
“Yes, Ginger, it was.”
“All of it?”
I thought about it. There’d been other women after Ginger, some who’d broken my heart just as badly—for some reason, it was a recurring problem—but she had been the first, the one who’d made me afraid to ever let my guard down again. “If you stayed up all night reading a multivid,” I said, “but the ending was so horrible that you threw the vid across the room, do you remember that the vid was good enough to keep you screening until that point? Or do you just remember how you felt at the end?”
“Hmm,” she said, a bit of a purr in her voice, “I was never one for reading. I always liked my pleasures a little more… real.”
When she said his, she ran her hand up my inner thigh. It would have been easy to give in, but there was no way I was going to let her get the upper hand with me, and I knew if we got anywhere near the bed she would definitely have the upper hand. She’d been a AAA sex professional, after all, certified by all the top prostitution boards and trained by the Sisters of Desire, the masters of erotic pleasure on New Saturn who only took in sixty-nine pupils each year.
I spun around and grabbed her shoulders. “Stop it,” I said. “You’re not doing this to me again.”
“Ow, darling, you’re hurting me.”
My fingers pressed into the soft flesh of her arms, but I didn’t loosen my grip. We stood close enough that I saw the flecks of gold in her emerald eyes, something new, something else she’d done to herself since we’d been together. We stood close enough that her breath was hot on my face. My heart was pounding.
“Listen,” I said, “if I do anything for you, it will be purely for money, got it? I don’t want you mentioning our past again. It’s just business. We’ve never met. I’m just Dexter Duff, private investigator. You understand? Am I getting through that thick skull of yours, darling?”
She blinked up at me. “So you’re saying you’ll do it?”
I sighed. Same old Ginger. You could talk and talk but she always picked out what she wanted to hear. If I ended up working for her, I knew what I was getting into. She was a liar and a cheat and she was good at getting people to do what she wanted even when they knew what she was.
“I’ll listen,” I said, but I felt like I’d already agreed.
The tramspace was always crowded in the morning, but I was in no mood to travel any farther with Ginger than necessary. A flurry of hoverpods docked and departed all around the giant transparent tunnel, a quarter mile across. The main concourse was filled with every life form and non-life form imaginable—humans, Dulnari, Hasians, and plenty of four-armed Veratians in their spiffy white uniforms directing tourists to different excursions, not to mention all the robots and androids carrying people’s bags. Beneath the invisible walkway—it was like we were all walking on air—dozens of massive white cruise ships floated in the sleek emerald waters of the Versatia’s famous ocean.
We were lucky, and found a table at a bistro not far from the transport tube. The smell of coffee and toasted bagels made my stomach grumble.
“It all started when—” Ginger began.
I held up a hand. “Not until I get my coffee.”
When were finally seated at a corner table, in a glass bubble overlooking the ocean, I kept her waiting until I’d buttered my bagel and put cream in my coffee. She clicked her fingernails on the shiny black countertop.
“All right,” I said.
“Really? I have your permission to speak now?”
“Don’t push your luck, kid.”
She smiled. “Kid? You haven’t called me that since you met me on the asteroid mining outfit where you stopped for repairs.”
“Should have left you there, too. Those miners have probably really missed your services.”
She made a clicking sound of displeasure with her tongue. “Now, now. All right, so where do I start? I assume you know that my husband is Vergon Daughn—”
That made me pause mid-bite into my bagel. “Vergon? Of Vergon Enterprises?”
She sighed. “Don’t you follow the news at all? My wedding four months ago was all over the vids. Yes, that Vergon. He built a fledgling stepdock company a decade ago into a massive corporation employing over a million people on thirty-three different planets.”
She was right that I didn’t follow the news much, but I did know a little about Vergon Daughn. When she’d mentioned being married to one of the richest stepdock manufacturers in the known universe, he definitely wasn’t who had come to mind—for one specific reason. “Um,” I began, “isn’t he… an android?”
“That’s right,” she said.
“You’re telling me you married an android?”
“Uh-huh. I wasn’t the one who liberated him and paid for his humanizing—some old bag who’d owned him did it before she died. But I definitely saw a good thing and went after him. Honestly, he didn’t stand a chance when I came along. He proposed within six weeks.”
I stared at her a long time, soaking all this in. My main complaint about Ginger had always been that she wasn’t born with the same set of emotions as other human beings—like the ability to empathize with someone other than herself—and here she went and married somebody who didn’t have emotions at all. Oh, androids could fake them, and some faked them so well that they could pass for human unless they walked under a bio scanner—but it was all an act. It was why, according to the laws of the Unity Worlds, even a liberated android still didn’t possess the full rights of a biological sentient—or biosen, for short. They would always be considered property. Now property could have a lot of rights, just like intergalactic corporations were property but still had plenty of rights, but it wasn’t the same.
Of course, there were lots of bleeding hearts of every race and planet who argued that liberated androids should be granted the same rights as biosens, but so far the law had been firm. Mostly this was because it was backed by hard science: androids may have been some of the most sophisticated machines every devised, but they were still machines.
Finally, I burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?” she said.
“You wouldn’t understand,” I said.
She offered up her trademark pout. “It’s not like I’m some lonely heart who bought an android to be my lover. He’s liberated and humanized—he could have chosen anyone, and believe me, he had plenty of women after him. It was love at first light.”
“First sight.”
She frowned. “If you understand what I’m saying, why do you always have to correct me? It’s one of the things that always irritated me about you.”
“If you’re irritated,” I said tersely, “you’re welcome to leave at any time.”
“Oh, no. No, darling. I’m sorry… It’s just this whole thing has me so upset. Forgive me, okay? I just didn’t get all the schooling you did. I’ve had to teach myself—after you taught me a lot of things, that is.” She sighed. “Anyway, to get back to what I was saying, it was love at first sight. But then Vergon went and screwed things up by becoming human.”
I was lifting the coffee cup to my lips, and in my surprise, I spilled some on the table. “What?”
“Oh, I have your attention now? Right before our wedding, he surprised me by showing up at our rehearsal dinner fully human. He showed himself off to our guests by bringing a handheld bio scanner with him. I was… shocked, to say the least. It’s called the BIP—Biological Imprinting Procedure. You grow a biosen in the lab, then use microlasers to imprint the same memories and thought patterns as the android.”
I mopped up the coffee with one of the paper napkins. I’d heard about the procedure, but the last I knew it was still in the research and development phase. There were also all kinds of ethical issues surrounding it. “Is that procedure now authorized by the Unity Worlds?”
“Of course not,” she said. “It’s going to be a lifetime before that happens, if ever. But if you have enough money, you can make things happen. And once he was human, what were they going to do? The bioscans all show him as human, and he made sure to confer all the legal rights on his human body of ownership in Vergon Enterprises just to make sure.”
“Why?” I said.
She grimaced. “To please me, of course.”
“What?”
“He said he wanted to love me for real. He said—he said—” She stopped, and there were tears brimming in her eyes. “He said I might not know the difference, but he would. He would know that he wasn’t feeling it, even if he was showing it.”
I wasn’t quite sure I bought her sudden display of weepiness. “Seems understandable. Do you blame him?”
“No! I don’t blame him. But he’s… not the same, Duff. You may not believe this, but I loved Vergon the way he was before.”
“You’re saying the procedure didn’t work?”
She took one of my napkins and dabbed at her eyes. “Oh, no, it worked,” she said. “It definitely worked. The human Vergon had all of the android Vergon’s memories. He’d made the body to look like him, too. At first, he even acted like him. But… he started changing. He acted moody all the time. He fell into a deep depression. It hurt his company—it began to go downhill. Then—then we had this awful fight. I told him I wished he’d never done it. I told him I loved him more as android.” She sniffled. “I guess that confirms everything you ever said about me… I really am awful deep down.”
I resisted the urge to take hold of her hand, and it was a powerful urge. “So what happened?” “He went back to being an android.”
“He did?”
She nodded. “He did the procedure in reverse—had another android body made, too, since he’d destroyed the original just to be safe. He made a big speech to the press, saying he’d planned to do it all along, that he wanted to test the laws that limited his rights, but I knew the truth. He was doing it to make me happy.”
“So what’s the problem?”
She looked up at me, eyes misty. “The problem,” she said, “is that he’s gone.”
“Gone? As in, dead?”
She shook her head. “I hope he’s not dead. Right after he did the procedure and gave a press conference, he vanished. He told his attendants he was going to use the restroom, and they went to look for him, he was gone. It’s been almost six weeks.”
“An android using the restroom?” I said.
“Yes, the attendants realized later how stupid they were. They’d just gotten used to him being human and forgot.”
“Have you hired other investigators?”
“No,” she said, “I’m afraid to.”
“Why? With your money, you could hire droves of them. That would increase your odds of finding him.”
She shook her head. “You don’t understand. I told you his company is going downhill. It’s even worse. There’s this other corporation, Granger Holdings, that’s trying to take it over. Because the stock price is down, they’re making a run at it. Without Vergon around to steady some nerves, the stockholders are starting to sell out. The thing is, Granger does exactly what Vergon does—make stepdocks. They just want to eliminate the competition. So if they get control of it, they’ll just sell off all the equipment to recoup their loses and then fire all the employees.”
“What does this have to do with hiring some private investigators?”
“Because I can’t trust anyone!” she insisted. “Already, I’m pretty sure I’m being followed.” She glanced over her shoulder, peering into the hordes of people passing along the concourse.
I didn’t see anyone but tourists. “Why?”
“Why! Because they don’t want me to find Vergon, that’s why. They want to keep the stock price low, and if he shows up, it will probably jump. The shareholders would wait to see what the brilliant Vergon Daughn is going to do. No, I’m afraid whoever I hire will really be working for them. I need somebody I can trust.”
“And you trust me?”
She nodded. “Iconic, isn’t it?”
“Ironic is the world you’re looking for, I think. And yes, it’s very ironic.”
“Iconic, ironic, whatever is it is, I need your help, Duff. I can’t do this without you. I want to find my husband.”
I said nothing.
“And if you won’t do it for me,” she said, “do it for the million employees of Vergon Enterprises that will lose their jobs. Do it for them. That’s why even if he’s dead…” She hesitated, closing her eyes and steadying herself before continuing. “Even if he’s dead, I need to know. At least the company could appoint a new CEO, which the board doesn’t want to do until they know for sure he’s gone. Maybe then we could still save the company.”
It was quite a tale. It would be easy enough to check, so I assumed it was true, but that didn’t mean I trusted her motives. But I was curious why a man—correction, an android—like Vergon Daughn would up and disappear, putting in jeopardy all his years of hard work. If nothing else, I could find Vergon just to satisfy that curiosity, and maybe, just maybe, I could end up doing some good while I was at it.
And, of course, get paid really well.
“All right,” I said, “I’ll find him for you.”
“Oh, good!”
“But I want the money up front.”
In the end, it was she who clasped my hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “Of course, Duff. Whatever you want.”
Looking at her, her eyes wide and her lips parting slightly, I remembered her whispering those very words to me late at night between satin sheets. I remembered and tried to put it out of my mind.
Money.
I was doing this for money.
The credit showed up in my account within ten minutes of Ginger passing through the stepdock back to the Vergon Enterprises headquarters on Palfacia Prime. It was twice even the outrageous amount I’d quoted to her, with so many zeroes in the number that I actually brought up the bank on nexlink to verify it wasn’t a mistake. Ever after the holorep assured me that the deposit was, indeed, accurate, I still procrastinated for the rest of the day before finally calling up my hotel client and asking him if I could take a hiatus for a couple of weeks for personal reasons, assuring him I’d come back and finish the job. I somewhat hoped he’d say no, but he didn’t.
Finally out of excuses, I set to work finding Mr. Vergon Daughn, the android who became a human who became an android.
The first thing I did was get in touch with the biomechanical engineer who performed the human-to-android transference, who, it turned out, was the same one who’d performed the BIP and made Vergon human in the first place—a tall and spindly Dulnari named Bwer Fwer. I tried him on the vid first and was told by a pert blond—so bubbly she had to be an android—that he’d see me that afternoon if I could come to his office.
His clinic, Mind-Body Technologies, was located on one of the oldest and richest planets in the Unity Worlds. It was a gas giant named Jellon with a trillion inhabitants and well over a hundred stepdocks, so there was no need to take a ship or shuttle at any point. But I’d been poor too long to take a direct step, so it still took two hours of hopping across the galaxy and fighting through crowded immigration controls to get to the gleaming black tower that contained his office.
After waiting in his lobby for another two hours, being asked by three different blond android secretaries why I was there, I wasn’t in the best of moods when a fourth bubbly blond finally showed me to his office. He was rising from his desk, a dark and wolfish figure with skin like elephant hide. Even in a sharp blue suit and red tie, he still came across as more than a little menacing, but I let loose with all of my built-up irritation anyway.
“If this is how you treat people who have appointments,” I said, “how do you treat everyone else?”
His beady eyes flared briefly, but it was the only outward sign of emotion. Right away I knew he was no ordinary Dulnari, because an ordinary Dulnari would have leapt across the table and gone for my throat at the slightest provocation.
A decade earlier, the Dulnari had been a major threat to the Unity Worlds, in a bloody war that lasted nearly thirty years, and even now there still weren’t many of them who held anything but the most mundane jobs. This was partly due to how much the war had set them back as a race, but it was mostly because of the nature of the Dulnari themselves. Because of their telepathic connections to one another, in concert they were incredibly intelligent, but individually they weren’t much smarter than low-grade AI floor sweepers. How one could ascend by himself to become a brilliant engineer—one Vergon was willing to risk his life with—was hard to believe.
“Mister Duff,” he said, extending his hand, “I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I was conferencing with several senators and they were being quite stubborn about some of my requests.”
It was the first time I’d shaken hands with a Dulnari. His four-fingered hand was smaller than my own, but his skin was tougher and thicker. There were lots of folks who still wouldn’t shake hands with a Dulnari, veterans of the war or victims of their atrocities, but I didn’t fall into either of those camps. The need had simply never arisen.
“It’s just Duff,” I said. “I would have been happy to talk to you over the vid, you know.”
“Yes, that would have certainly been more convenient,” he said, “but I felt it was necessary to talk to you in person.” He froze for a second, and it was like watching a hiccup in a vid feed. “Yes, yes, quite right. Most unusual.”
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“Hmm?”
“What’s unusual?”
“What do you mean?”
It was like he didn’t know what he’d just said. Some form of schizophrenia or stepdock madness? I’d also never heard a Dulnari speak in such an articulate manner, especially in Unity Worlds Prime. He motioned to one of the two seats across from him. It was then, when he slightly cocked his head to the side, that I noticed something black and electronic behind his ears, tiny lights flashing red and blue.
“You have an implant,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, showing no sign of offense. “The ones I make now are much less crude, completely internal, but mine is now so integrated into my biological processes that it would extremely problematic to remove it.”
“Is that why you’re…” I began, not knowing quite how to phrase the question.
“Smarter than your average individual Dulnari?” he finished for me. “Yes. My implant contains a hundred mature Dulnari intelligences. All AIs, of course, but my mind sees them no differently than the real thing… The flaring is quite unusual this time of year.”
“Excuse me?”
He blinked a few times. “Hmm?”
“You said something about the flaring being unusual this time of year.”
“I did? Oh, yes. The side effects. You see, though the implant gives me the intelligence of a small Dulnari group mind, I have not yet perfected the natural filter process that works with a real group mind. So I may occasionally say things not intended for you. I apologize for this in advance. Please, be seated.”
I did, and so did he. The three windows behind him displayed a gorgeous view of the city’s skyline, but everything else about the room was absolutely sterile: a desk with a built-in monitor and keyboard, three chairs, and nothing else. Not even a couple of holovids on the walls.
“I never intended to spend much time here,” he explained.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“This room, I see the way you’re looking at it. But I always intended it to be mostly for show. I’m a lab rat, Duff. That’s where I’d like to spend most of my time, and where I did spend most of my time until my company was bought out. Then the new owners made certain changes that forced me into more of a… diplomatic role.” He said the last two words with a sneer, and for just a moment I thought of the wolf in the Red Riding Hood fairy tale, dressed up in human clothes and pretending to be something he wasn’t.
“Hobnobbing with senators, you mean?” I said.
“Exactly. It’s dreadfully boring… Multivids are on sale in Setifine… But you don’t care about any of that. Let me tell you why we had to meet in person. When Ginger Daughn first questioned me about all of this, I was absolutely convinced that her husband’s disappearance had nothing at all to do with his procedure—or at least, that nothing in his procedure directly caused it. It went perfectly. Every test confirmed it… the low-g yoga is best after breakfast… If he disappeared, it was either his own choice or because he was abducted, not because there was some defect in the transference that modified his personality.” He shook his head. “Now, I’m not so sure.”
His non-sequiturs were annoying, but I was getting better at ignoring them. “What do you mean?”
He clasped his slender hands and leaned his long snout on them, closing his eyes for a moment before answering. “Our equipment has been tampered with.”
“What?”
He opened his eyes and looked at me. “It’s why I had to have you come here in person. I don’t know who to trust… The headaches go away in a few days, Kylor tells me.”
I pretended he hadn’t made the headache comment. “You sound like Ginger,” I said. “She didn’t know who to trust either.”
“Honestly, I’m not even sure I can trust you, Duff. However, one of the reasons you were kept waiting was that we were performing scans of your responses to our questioning. There is every indication that you are truly here investigating Vergon Daughn’s death.”
“You gave me a lie detector test?”
He nodded. “Three of them, in fact. I’m sorry about that, but I had to be sure… A hangover is no cure for happiness.”
“Who tampered with the equipment?”
“If I knew that,” he said, “I probably wouldn’t need your help.”
“What was done?”
He clicked his fingernails on the desk. Dulnari fingernails had the same look and texture as volcanic glass, so the clicking sounded vaguely like tinging wine goblets. “It’s hard to say. It turned up on a deep diagnostic, meaning it was somebody who really knew what they were doing… I don’t play MateMax at the Laztor, no.”
“What happened to the human body?”
“It was disposed of. I personally attended to its incineration.”
“You… killed him?”
“Oh, no. That would be murder according to Unity Worlds law, even if that’s not technically what it is. No, he committed suicide, which is entirely legal here on Jellon. He had several witnesses from the press there. He wanted absolutely no doubt that the new android Vergon Daughn was the only Vergon Daughn. Otherwise there could be sticky legal issues… I se...
