Caine's Law by Matthew Stover Read Free Book Online Page A

Exceedingly fragile.”
    “It wasn’t too sturdy before.”
    “The belief was that his expertise in Studio operations, and intimate acquaintance with your career, would on balance make him an asset. But—” He turns up his hands. “—everyone makes mistakes, yes?”
    I turn the switch over in my hand. I imagine my face must look like I’m holding a handful of radioactive weasel shit. “The more I think about this, the more I’m liking the slavery-and-execution option.”
    Gayle nods to this too, with a tiny sigh of regret. “Professional Faller, if you don’t mind—?”
    “This is … the rest of their offer.” Faller’s grey as his suit. Dark swipes underline his eyes like smears of dried blood. He touches a control surface on the palmpad’s casing. “Look at this.”
    The screen changes. At first I can’t make sense of it. A tangle of tubes and wires go into and out from some kind of mannequin, a Halloween decoration–looking thing, a plastic ghoul, shriveled and corpse-white, hairless parchment skin glued over jutting bones, empty eye sockets sprouting twists of cable like fiber-optic tears. “So?”
    “Look again. It’s not easy to see,” he says faintly. “Because … well, you don’t
want
to, you follow?”
    I look again. After a second or two, I catch motion: the image isn’t astill—faint color-shifts flow along a tube here or there, and the white plastic eye sockets … 
twitch
 … the echo of a blink pressing flesh around the cables …
    Acid creeps up the back of my throat. “It’s alive.”
    “Yes.”
    “What the fuck is this thing?”
    “It’s a Worker.”
    “Yeah?” Workers aren’t good for anything complex; the cyborging shorts out higher brain function. “What kind of work does anybody get out of that?”
    “Data processing.” Faller’s voice goes thick, like he’s trying not to gag. “I was told that … this
unit
 … is part of the Social Police signal-filter complex.”
    My mouth’s so dry I can’t even swallow the up-trickle of acid. “This is the stick, huh? Wire me up so I don’t have a choice?”
    “It’s worse than that. Michaelson … Hari …” Faller’s voice falls like he’s praying. Maybe he is.
    Maybe his god is kinder than mine.
    “You’re still not
seeing
. Because … because like I said, you don’t want to. It’s your mind, not your eyes.”
    “What, some kind of, whateverthefuck, psychological defense mechanism or some fucking thing? Because if I ever had any, they broke a long time ago. Burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp.”
    No answer. No response at all. The face on the screen …
    There’s something about the way the hairless brow arches down to join the cheekbone … if those wires weren’t in the way, I would have seen it already. This Worker used to be somebody I know.
    It’s not all that easy to pick out a face, not when it’s somebody dead. Who you think is dead. Someone whose head’s been shaved, even the eyebrows and eyelashes. Somebody whose flesh has melted away with age and starvation and whose eyes have been ripped out to make room for cables, and my fingers go numb and my legs, they go numb too and their weight drags at me, hauls me down through the bed, through the deck, freefall into the earth. Into the bedrock. “Him? That’s him?
That?
”
    “I’m sorry.”
    When the Social Police came for him the final time, that night at the Abbey … standing on the marble threshold of my marble archway, helpless in the moonlight, watching them load him into the back of a detention van on my front lawn …
    No good-byes. The digivoder that had been his only voice lay in pieceson the floor beside his bed, crushed under a soapy’s boot heel … His nurse at my shoulder … I remember asking, faintly, my lips numb and clumsy—
    How long do you think he has?
    Bradlee Wing, faithful Bradlee, who I haven’t thought of in forever, maybe not since that same night—
He probably