Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [16]
Oh, Silas, he thought, what on earth have you done? Who can you possibly have annoyed sufficiently to get yourself kidnapped? And why have the Eliminators turned their attention to a saint who’s been dead for nearly fifty years?
Four
D
amon knew that there was no point searching the apartment for the bugs that Sergeant Rolfe had planted while he was wandering around. Interpol undoubtedly had nanomachines clever enough to evade detection by his antique sweeper. Nor was he about to ask for help—Building Security had better sweepers but they also had a rather flexible view of the right to privacy that they were supposedly there to guarantee. He had enough demerits on his account already without giving formal notification of the fact that he was under investigation by a high-level law enforcement agency.
Instead, he donned his phone hood and started making calls.
It was, as he’d anticipated, a waste of time. Everybody in the world—not to mention everybody off-world—had a beltpack and a personal call-number, but that didn’t mean that anybody in the world was accessible twenty-four hours a day. Everybody in the world also had an AI answering machine, which functioned for most people as a primary status symbol as well as a protector of privacy, and which needed to be shown off if they were to perform that function adequately. The higher a man’s social profile was the cleverer his AI needed to be at fielding and filtering calls. Damon usually had no cause to regret the trend—customizing virtual environments for the AI simulacra to inhabit provided nearly 40 percent of his business—but whenever he actually wanted to make urgent contact with some people he found the endless routine of stagy reply sequences just as frustrating as anyone else.
Karol Kachellek’s simulacrum was standing on a photo-derived Hawaiian beach with muted breakers rolling in behind him. The unsmiling simulacrum brusquely reported that Karol was busy operating a deep-sea dredger by remote control and couldn’t be disturbed. It warned Damon that his call was unlikely to be returned for several hours, and perhaps not until the next day.
Damon told the sim that the matter was urgent, but the assurances he received in return were patently hollow.
Eveline Hywood’s simulacrum wasn’t even full length; it was just a detached head floating in what Damon took to be a straightforward replication of her lab. The room’s only decoration—if even that could be reckoned a mere ornament—was a window looking out upon a rich star field. It was the kind of panorama which people who lived with five miles of atmosphere above their heavy heads only ever got to see in virtual form, and it therefore functioned as a status symbol, even though Lagrangists were supposed to be above that sort of thing. The sim’s gray hair was trimmed to a mere fuzz, according to the prevailing minimalist philosophy of the microgee colonists, but its features were slightly more naturalistic than those Karol had contrived for his alter ego.
The sim told Damon that Eveline was working on a delicate series of experiments and wouldn’t be returning any calls for at least twenty-four hours. Again, Damon told the sim that the matter was urgent—but the sim looked back at him with a cold hauteur which silently informed him that nothing happening on Earth could possibly be urgent by comparison with the labor of a dedicated Lagrangist.
Damon doubted that the news about Silas and the strange declaration of Operator 101 had reached either of his foster parents as yet; unless Interpol had sent someone to see them face-to-face the information would be stuck in the same queue as his own calls, probably assigned an equally low priority by the two AI filtering devices.
Madoc Tamlin’s simulacrum