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  I ignored him, kept my eyes mostly on the gray tunnel ceiling ten stories up. And in a few minutes I reached the King’s Palace.

  The King was even older than I was. He claimed to be the first ’ganger replica of a historic figure, and nobody had evidence otherwise. His movement algorithms reflected his antiquity. He was full of limb twitches and facial tics that were the result of old, never-optimized code. He wore his rhinestone-studded jumpsuits, he served drinks and sang, he sneered at his customers but didn’t mean it. Given his freedom by the terms of his owner’s will when that grand old dame died half a century ago, he built his bar, with game rooms to the side, rental bedrooms above, neon everywhere, to look like a casino from one of Earth’s great gambling centers of centuries ago.

  Now I sat at the King’s bar and nursed a drink. Dollgangers don’t need to eat or drink much, just a few lubes and materials saturations for our nanoplants to use for maintenance, but we have taste sensors, so our food and drink makers are all about creating taste combinations that delight, surprise, offend, or remind. My choice today was a Greasepaint Surprise, a thick, chalk-white concoction that tasted as good as it sounded. But it was Punch’s favorite, so I drank it in his memory.

  There were a few other bar patrons at this hour. They tended to ignore me. The King returned from serving one of them and plunked his elbows down on the bar before me. “He’ll be missed. Punch.”

  I snorted. “Will you miss him, King?”

  He thought about that and adjusted his tinted, for-cosmetic-purpose-only glasses. “No, I surely won’t. I barely knew him. But you will. So he’ll be missed. The logic of my statement is irrefutable, thankyouverymuch.”

  The stool next to me creaked as someone settled onto it. I glanced over and my heart skipped a beat.

  Okay, sure. Dollgangers have no hearts, so there’s nothing to skip. But the coding at the core of our individual behavior is inherited from human emotions, including physical reactions to those feelings. So seeing a gorgeous female does to me what it does to a straight human male.

  Too bad it was Lina.

  That’s not her full name. A Shavery Corporation safety engineer, named by a middle manager who should have been drowned at birth, she bore the unfortunate moniker of Thumbelina 1109-X-Ray-Baker. But to herself, and to all of us, she was Lina, and she’d give you hell if you used the full version of her first name.

  I don’t know who her creators had modeled her on, but they’d chosen well. She was small and lean, with coloration Doc referred to as Mediterranean. She had long, straight dark-brown hair and a face that looked like it belonged in old immersives from back when they were called movies. Her human original had apparently been a dancer and her movements were graceful, fascinating. Today, she’d already changed out of the lime-green Shavery Corporation jumpsuit that was the duty uniform for their ’gangers, and she wore a burgundy skirt and white peasant blouse; she was barefoot, as was usual in her off-duty hours. On her right cheek was the small image of a rose—not a tattoo, because Shavery would never have allowed that, but paint that she’d wash off before reporting for her next shift.

  Yeah, Lina was hot, and that means the same thing to ’gangers that it does to meat people.

  On the other hand, the nicest thing she’d ever brought herself to call me was Big Plush.

  But this time Lina looked at me like she suddenly gave a damn. “Bow, are you all right?”

  “You heard about Punch, then.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m coping.” I tilted my glass at her. “Even though he had the worst taste in drinks.”

  “Have you had any weird thoughts or dreams since it happened?”

  I shook my head. “That’s a strange question.”

  “Any hint that maybe you’ve had your transponder modded, or had a new one installed?”

  That caused me to set my glass down. “Now you’re talking paranoid.”

  “I don’t think I am. Bow, we need to get you checked out. Go ahead and settle up.”

  The word “we” raised some flags in my mind. She could have just meant herself and me, but Lina’s dislike of me wasn’t just an individual antipathy. There was a whole population of ’gangers who constantly talked about freedom from the meat people. She was one of them.

  Her interest made me curious. I glanced past the King at his scanner, the gleaming four-sided black post rising behind the bar. In my mind’s eye, I called up my tab, paid it with Warrens credit, and added an okay tip.

  The King frowned. “You could do better than that.”

  I frowned back. “You could have pretended to like Punch.”

  –3–

  BeeBee

  Lina took me to BeeBee’s BodyWerks.

  I’d heard about the place over the years but never had an idea where it was. It turned out to be several levels down in a deep chamber where the terraformers had set up their original transformers, converters, pumping stations, and other infrastructure machinery.

  I’d been on the crew that repaired and restored the pumping station. Now, to my surprise, as Lina and I turned the final corner bringing us behind the floor-to-ceiling block of machinery and were out of sight of other ’gangers, a floor-level back panel of the station housing slid aside, revealing a ’ganger-scale portal. Lina preceded me in and the panel slid shut behind us. Inside, our ears were hammered by the rhythmic clanking of the old machinery.

  Since I’d last seen the station interior, maybe fifty years previously, it had clearly been worked on. Some of its old-style systems had been replaced with more modern solid-state gear, opening up a lot of room in the huge casing. Dollganger-scale rooms, stairs, and elevators, all painted black with glossy chrome and silver appointments, had been installed.

  Years back, after decades of serving the Chiron Defense Force as a demolitions expert, after being blown up and fully restored three times, BeeBee had burned out her transponder and disappeared, living as a fugitive in the Warrens. She traded her mechanical expertise for supplies, equipment, and favors. I’d run into her a number of times, occasions when she let me know just what she thought of plushes, then scrammed in case I called in her owners. I didn’t, but plushes were always suspected of ratting out ’gangers who broke the rules.

  Lina and I climbed several flights of stairs, up to a broad, low-ceilinged chamber where the sound of water pumping was much reduced. There, against one black wall, sat a scratch-built charging and maintenance bed. It was a chrome-plated steel tubing frame with electronic gear, some of it naked circuitry, laced all through the framework. The bed surface itself was a ’ganger-scale mattress unattractively wrapped in clear plastic. On the opposite wall was a black desk which looked like it had been modded from a human-scale ammo case, It supported a bank of monitors. BeeBee sat in a fake-leather office chair there.

  She looked as unhappy as if she’d just been drinking a Greasepaint Surprise. She barely glanced at me, but gave Lina a full-bore “You had to do it” look.

  BeeBee, like Lina, was nice to look at. So many ’gangers are, regardless of whether their personalities matched. BeeBee was tall, facial features that were all dewy-eyed ingenue, body that filled out her black jumpsuit in all the right ways. Ages ago, she had cut her original long blond hair into a bob and dyed it black, and she wore big reflective-lens sunglasses that hid her eyes.

  Shaking her head, she turned back to her monitor screens. “On the dissecting table, plush.”

  I stretched out on the mattress. “Good to see you, too, Boom-Boom.”

  Her shoulders rose a little. She didn’t much care for that nickname or the others I’d coined for her, including Ball-Buster and Ballistic Barbie. No one knew what her original name had been.

  Lina helped pull the direct-link gloves onto my hands. Looking like human-style leather work gloves, they had braided cables of transparent data lines leading from the cuffs into the machinery of the bed. As soon as I had them on, I felt probes extrude from the inner fingertips and creep under my fingernail
s, where they jacked in.

  I suppressed an expression of distaste. Direct links are damned intrusive, pleasant only during sex.

  Screens lit up in front of BeeBee, showing graphical schematics and scrolling screens of data. I was surprised she wasn’t just receiving all that stuff wirelessly, but then it made sense—she probably limited radio traffic in her shop to keep sensor-bots, which sometimes entered the Warrens, from detecting her.

  Looking at the data, she shook her head. “No overt sign of recent mods. Let’s see what the tests tell us.” She typed a quick command on a virtual on-screen keypad.

  A pop-up authorization box appeared in my vision, requesting access to my memories, permission to alter data, permission to thrash my hardware. Grudgingly, I approved the first and third choices.

  Now, imagine suddenly being plunged back into previous events of your life, immersively, with those events sometimes stuttering, skipping, time flowing forward and backward, images and sounds overlapping. Imagine your limbs twitching uncontrollably, sometimes in sequence, sometimes randomly or all at once. Imagine the sensation of your internal fluid pressure rising to the point that you’re certain you’re going to pop, then dropping until you almost black out.

  Imagine that going on for half an hour and it feeling like two days.

  When it was done, I was happy to yank the gloves off and clamber, still twitching, free from that device of torture. I leaned against its metal headboard while BeeBee clucked over the data.

  Then she looked up at Lina. “It was not a natural power-down. I’m sure he tracked for an hour or more after the break in his memory … and then he was zapped.”

  I glared at her. “I’m right here.”

  She glanced at me over the top of her glasses. I could see her weird red pupils, mods she’d acquired to replace her original sky-blues. “Quiet, plush. Free people are talking.” She returned her attention to Lina. “But there’s no sign of new programming or hardware. His one transponder is stock, factory issue. Ancient.”

  Lina arched an eyebrow at BeeBee. “And?”

  “And, nothing. I still say no. For the record.”

  “Punch trusted him.”

  BeeBee gave her a you’re-dumber-than-a-motorized-wheelbarrow look. “And now he’s dead.”

  “Sorry, BeeBee. It’s my call.” Lina turned her attention back to me. “I have a recording I want you to see.” She held up a hand toward mine, fingers outstretched.

  I hesitated. A really good technician—like me, like BeeBee—could potentially disguise harmful code as innocuous data. Still, dammit, I wanted all the facts. I brought my right hand up to her left, fingertips to fingertips.

  Probes stretched from under two of my fingernails and slid under her corresponding nails; probes of two of hers slid under mine. I detected an audio/video file coming in and authorized it being saved. My internals found no malicious code in the file. A moment later, Lina pulled her hand away.

  I activated the file. It showed Punch in the purple jumpsuit he’d been wearing the day we repaired the shuttle. Behind him was a gray wall marked with stray blotches of black paint and what looked like insect droppings. This was probably the interior of a ship’s compartment wall on Rockrunner. Every ’ganger had hidey-holes at his place of work.

  Looking more serious than usual, Punch spoke. “Today I’m going to talk with Bow. If something goes wrong, I’ll fry myself before I let them have any of my data. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

  There was a skip, and there he was again, same clothes but more rumpled. He looked a little relieved. “Talked to Bow. He didn’t commit, but it’s clear that it’s weighing on him. I give it better than fifty-fifty.”

  Then the recording ended.

  I checked the time stamps. The first segment was recorded hours before he and I repaired the shuttle. The second was about an hour after my memory of the repair job terminated—a time when I was supposed to be unconscious and Punch drifting down toward his final incineration.

  What the hell had Punch told me?

  BeeBee doubtless thought that I’d turned him in. But she had to know I didn’t remember any such event. Was I guilty of betraying Punch but innocent by reason of amnesia? Not even I knew.

  Lina, regardless of her distaste for me, had to believe I was innocent. Otherwise she wouldn’t have made contact, exposing both herself and BeeBee to betrayal.

  I looked between them. “What did Punch tell me?”

  Lina jerked her head toward the exit. “Let’s take a walk.”

  * * *

  Lina and I walked the High Road.

  The Warrens constituted a city built by anarchic cooperation, with anyone contributing anything he wanted. Some of the stuff was pretty strange. Sculptures welded together from discarded human-sized appliances, amusement park rides cobbled together from radio-controlled toys, dance floors fashioned from tough old monitor faces. The High Road was an engineering impossibility, miraculous because it was still up—an elevated walkway, rising in places to eight meters above the city floor, welded from scrap by geniuses and idiots. It swayed under the weight of pedestrians and was sometimes the target of medieval-style siege engines. But since so few ’gangers actually wanted to risk injury on its dangerous heights, it was pretty private, and Lina and I could walk its length, gripping the uneven rails to either side, without bumping into anyone else.

  We had stopped midway along the walkway three meters above the summit of Lemuel’s Needle, a wire-frame Egyptian-style obelisk made of struts and cables, its interior open for all to see. At its summit, an amorous pair of guys, when not grazing on each other’s necks, waved up at us. Lina watched them without really noticing them. ““It was top secret. But a replacement-parts order that went off-course tipped us off.”

  “To what?” I figured that if the rail gave way at this exact moment, I’d plummet and smash into the top of the Needle, flattening the two lovers. I wondered how much of the Needle the impact would collapse.

  “A ComFab. A compact nanotech fabrication unit, Bow. Set up for ’gangers. We know where and when it’s going to be ready for delivery.”

  A chill gripped me. It was like discovering that I’d walked up to the edge of a thousand-meter clifftop without noticing, and one more step would send me on a long, fatal fall. I turned so that I was facing her square on, not just looking at her. The walkway swayed under my feet.

  Understand, ’gangers have always considered ourselves as living beings, a species. But we don’t reproduce. There were no ’ganger babies or children. Creation of new ’gangers took place in automated fabrication units. The units of a century and a half back were full-sized factories, but modern nanotech-based fabbers could fit on a full-sized hauler trailer.

  All fabbers were in the hands of humans, of course. They cost as much as a continent on a newly-terraformed colony world. One of them could jump-start a whole planetary economy.

  And valid or not, one of the stated reasons the meats didn’t class us as a true life form was that we couldn’t reproduce without their help. The unstated reason behind the reason was that we were far too valuable to be allowed to “breed in the wild.”

  But if a fabber set up for Dollganger production fell into our hands…

  Lina looked up at me as solemnly as if she’d been telling me about meeting the human God.

  It took me a moment to find my voice. “You’re going to steal it.”

  “We sure as hell are. And we need you, Bow.” Lina’s voice was barely loud enough for me to hear. And neither of us was transmitting wirelessly for clarity; we didn’t want any part of this conversation to be overheard. “To do this, we need vehicles. Megas. Weapons. On all of Chiron, you’re the ’ganger with the most access, the most experience with these things.”

  “Dammit, Lina, there are only two ways for this to end. Fail, and the humans wipe out all the participants and probably a lot of innocent ’gangers as well. Succeed, and we have to hide for years while the humans try to fin
d and exterminate us … and they’ll still wipe out ’gangers who had nothing to do with the operation.”

  She nodded. “Either one is better than what we have now.”

  “You’re not speaking for all of us. You’re not speaking for me.”

  “I know.” An expression crossed her face, anger at odds with the flower on her cheek, doubtless some bitter recrimination of the plushes. But she held it in check, unwilling to insult someone whose help she needed.

  I looked out over the old atrium, at the ’ganger city of discarded scrap shaped to our tastes. The atrium walls were covered in mirrored polymers, giving the place an illusion of greater size and allowing me to look at my own reflection an apparent hundred meters away.

  I liked my life the way it was. I felt no need to be involved in the insanity Lina was proposing.

  But then I looked at her, at the yearning on her face, and I hesitated. If I said no, I was deciding to keep her and others like her as they were. People of no consequence who could be endangered, used up, even murdered by their owners with no consequence except financial loss.

  I looked down at the two lovers. Arms around each other, they now descended the internal stairs of the Needle. They’d forgotten all about us.

  I returned my attention to Lina. “I have to think about this.”

  –4–

  Stand-Ups

  I sat on Doc’s recliner arm and watched him sleep.

  He had always treated me well, with fairness and affection.

  Except … the scrubbing of part of my memory had to have been done with his permission. Maybe he’d done it himself. He certainly had the skills.