city blues 01 - dome city blues by jeff edwards Read Free Book Online

that.  There was something hypnotic about it, as though the hologram were a living thing instead of a weirdly distorted digital recording.
    Somehow, from across the crowded bar, the hologram’s gaze met mine.  I found myself staring into its eyes, and I saw an agony reflected there that nearly staggered me.
    “I can’t stop them,” the hologram said.  “Leaves of corruption are falling on my face, burrowing their way like insects down into the empty chasm of my heart, and I CAN... NOT ... STOP... THEM...”
    It suddenly seemed possible that I might stand there forever, crucified by the power of the holo’s gaze.  Then the tortured eyes flicked away from me, and began wandering the room again.  The spell of pain was broken.
    I tore my eyes away and stared at the floor.  It took me a couple of seconds to remember why I’d come here.  Finally, I lifted my head and started scanning the crowd for Jackal.

    I found her sitting at a table at the end of the room opposite Insanity .  Seated next to her was a kid I’d never seen before.  He was augmented cybernetically, heavily augmented.  Enough of him was hidden behind hardware implants to make it difficult to read his age, but my best guess was about seventeen.  He was definitely too young for the bar scene, but no one seemed to be interested in scanning his ID-chip.
    Where the kid’s eyes should have been, cylindrical electroptic lenses protruded from his eye sockets like the barrels of twin video cameras.  His camera eyes whirred softly as the lenses spun to bring me into focus.  His right hand looked normal, but his left was cybernetic, an articulated alloy skeleton that made me think of robotic bones.  His head was shaved, his scalp tattooed with intricate patterns of circuit runs.  The servomotors in his cybernetic hand emitted sporadic electro-mechanical whimpers whenever he moved his fingers.  He stared at me for a second and then shifted his electroptic eyes back to Insanity’s performance art.
    I turned to Jackal.  If anything, she looked thinner than she had the night before.  In place of the jump suit, she wore blue stretch-pants and a white sweatshirt with the sleeves ripped off.  The front of the shirt was a photo-active trid depicting a famous cartoon mouse sodomizing his cutesy mouse girlfriend in lurid 3-D.  The mouse appeared to move in and out when Jackal turned her body.
    Jackal motioned me to a seat.
    I sat down without ordering.  I didn’t intend to be there very long.
    Jackal started to say something, but Cyber-kid interrupted her.  “They think that shit is funny,” he said.
    His voice was gravelly, obviously generated by a speech synthesis chip.  I was struck by the certainty that he’d had his own larynx removed, just so he could speak with the voice of a machine.
    “They’re too stupid to know what they’re doing,” he said.  “Either that, or they’re too stupid to care.”
    Jackal took a swallow of her bright green drink.  “It’s no big deal,” she said.
    “That asshole is torturing it,” the kid said in his metallic voice.  His camera-eyes were locked on the performance artist’s floating hologram.  “And everybody thinks it’s funny.”
    I forced myself to look down the length of the bar room at the hologram, ready to jerk my eyes away the instant I felt the touch of its electric gaze.  From this distance, the face’s jabbering voice was hard to hear over the murmurings of the customers.
    “It’s like it’s alive,” I said.  “At first, I thought it was just a vid recording, but it’s more than that, isn’t it?”
    “It’s a Scion,” Jackal said.
    “A Turing Scion?” I asked.
    “Yeah,” the kid said.  “A digital image of a human mind.  And Asshole over there is driving it crazy, on purpose .”
    I knew a little something about Turing Scions.  The concept had been around since the nineteen forties, the brainchild of Alan Turing, the British mathematician who’d invented digital