Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [28]
“Is it nice?” he asked.
“Is what nice?” I said, turning to look at Howie through the doorway. He was standing by his desk, holding a sheaf of invoices.
“The truck you’ve bought. The truck you went out to buy Is it a nice color? Is it comfortable? Did you check it thoroughly for rust spots and thunking noises?”
“I haven’t bought it yet.”
Howie sighed. “I know you haven’t, Jack.”
I walked into the office and stood in front of him. “Have you been out to Mal’s today?”
“Of course I haven’t. The Portal is from hunger. I only go out there to collect money from recalcitrant subcontractors.”
“Mal’s body has disappeared.”
There was a pause. “Say again?”
“The floor’s been cleaned. It’s like it never happened.” I didn’t mention Mal’s private photo display.
Howie shrugged. “So someone buried him as a random act of kindness, and tidied up as an encore.”
“I locked the door when we left yesterday. It was still locked when I got there.”
Howie looked at the papers in his hand. “So what are you saying?”
“I’m asking if we can stay another night.”
“Are we on the same page here, Jack? Someone who is both very organized and quite tidy is trying to kill you, and you want to hang around?”
“I also need to borrow your computer.”
“To work out how much gas it’ll take you to get a long way from here?”
“Turn speech recognition on, Howie. You know I’m going to stay.”
Howie sighed and jerked his thumb in the direction of his machine. “Help yourself. Then come out into the bar and have a beer. You look like you need it.”
When he’d gone I flipped the drive out of his computer and slotted Mal’s in. Then I connected the digipic up to the serial slot and turned the whole lot on.
“Password,” the computer said, bluntly.
“Pardon me?” Tasked. I knew perfectly well what it meant. I was just surprised to hear my own voice coming out of the speaker.
“The password, ass-wipe.”
“I don’t know it,” I said.
“So take a guess. I’ve got nothing better to do.”
“Samoy,” I offered, off the top of my head and with no little irony.
“Correct,” the machine said, and started whipping through the start-up procedure.
I shook my head. “Oh, Mal,” I said. Security had never been his strong point.
“You can stop congratulating yourself, smartass,” the machine snapped. “‘Samoy’ isn’t the real password. The real password is a thirty-digit combination of numbers and letters which is a real bastard to pronounce.”
“So why are you letting me in? And what is your fucking problem?”
“Mal left a loophole. He figured the only guy who’d come up with the name of the second-best brand of Japanese pickles would be you. I’d compared your voice patterns with mine before you even got that far. I was just pissing you around. And you’re the one with the problem, dickweed.”
“Look,” I snarled, “do you want a fight?”
“Yeah? You and whose pliers?”
“Are there some default versonalities on Mal’s board?” I asked.
“Might be.”
“Are there or not?”
“Why? Don’t you like the sound of your own voice?”
“The voice isn’t a problem.”
“Mal downloaded this versonality specially. He said it was the closest thing to you he’d ever heard.”
“I have to live with it all the time. Give me something else.”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll boot up off another drive and erase you with a soldering iron.”
“Tough guy. There’s two. Nerd or Bimbo.”
“Give me the Nerd,” I said.
“Can’t. Mal wiped its voice to make room for yours.”
“Bimbo, please.”
“You’ll regret it,” the machine sniped.
“You been talking to fridges?” I asked. The cursor changed to represent some process that might take a while—I thought it was probably a woman getting ready to go out, but it was too small to be sure. Then the interface popped into view—a sparse 3-D room with animated agents waiting round the edges of the screen. At the back were four doors representing entrances to the machine’s Matrix channels. One was permanently assigned to the Police subnet. The others were generic. I was glad to see Mal had stuck with an old-fashioned 2-D interface. Dicking around with VR gloves had always made