Proxy, page 7
There was more than enough time for Elijah to figure out who was gunning for him. And then they’d wish they’d never heard of him.
“Listen,” Lorenz told Elijah the next day, waving a roll-up in his face, “nobody does a fucking hit in this establishment unless it comes through me first.” Lorenz leaned back, folding one tattooed arm under an armpit and regarding him through the smoke. “Sure you didn’t tickle Stobbs’ balls for a laugh?”
“Very sure,” said Elijah.
They were sitting in Lorenz’s cell in the early evening, an hour during which the Scrubs allowed prisoners to mix with relatively minimal supervision. It had only confirmed Elijah’s worst fears when he wasn’t charged for assault; nor was there any mention of Stobb’s shiv. Instead, they treated the whole thing like it had been an accident and let Elijah go before loading Stobbs into an ambulance.
It took a lot of money to make that many screws look the other way and avoid any chance of an official enquiry.
Davie, Lorenz’s second-in-command, stood by the open cell door, his unwavering gaze fixed on Elijah.
Lorenz took another drag on his cigarette. “And the screws just vanished, you say?”
Elijah nodded. “Like smoke.”
“Not much chance of asking Stobbs who paid him to have a go at you now he’s in intensive care.” One corner of Lorenz’s mouth creased into a grin. “You upset anyone before they tossed you in here?”
Elijah shrugged. “Lots of people.”
Lorenz made a noncommittal sound. “You’re in for proxy dealing, right?”
“Ah heard it wis murder,” said Davie, in a booming Glaswegian accent.
Elijah stared at Davie. “Sure, yeah, that too. But it was a stitch-up,” he quickly added.
“Oh?” Lorenz said. “How so?”
“I got body-jacked,” Elijah explained. “Somebody clubbed me in the back of my head when I stepped out of the building where me and my mate had our proxy factory and the next thing I knew, I was handcuffed to a desk in a trailer. The walls were all covered in circus posters in some language that wasn’t English. And the skin I found myself in was dressed up like a circus acrobat.”
“A—?” Lorenz coughed out smoke and stared at Elijah in disbelief. “A what?”
“Point is, I was stuck in that bastard’s skin for six solid hours with no idea what the hell he was doing with my own body. When I finally found myself back in my own skin, I was inside my proxy factory, covered head to foot in blood, with a hammer in one hand and my best mate’s corpse lying at my feet with his skull smashed in.”
“In fairness,” said Lorenz, looking amused, “there’s hardly a murder trial these days where the defendant doesn’t claim they were forcibly proxied. It’s not the most original defence.”
“Yes, I know that,” said Elijah, “but in my case it’s true. It happens, you know. Someone tipped the cops off. They turned up in force barely a minute after I woke up back in my own skin. They knew exactly where to find the factory.”
“Kind of ironic, though,” said Lorenz, picking at an ear. “You running a proxy factory, then getting set up by someone using proxy. Any idea who might have wanted to take you out of the picture?”
Elijah shrugged. “Most likely someone wanted to take over my business. After they locked me up, I paid someone to try and track down the guy who’d used my body to murder Rob, but the best they could figure out was that they had been proxying with me from somewhere in Eastern Europe. Dead end, basically.”
Few proxy factories lasted as much as six months. Either their owners got nicked, or they got taken over by some other crew. It was quite possible someone had set Elijah up precisely so they could take over his and Rob’s factory, secreted as it was in a disused building in a run-down industrial estate on the outskirts of Croydon.
Plus, word had been getting around about just how much money he and Rob had been making, manufacturing the new, longer-lasting proxy technology known as hopscotch. There was no lack of willing buyers, and that kind of attention could either get you nicked or killed.
But Elijah had had questions about hopscotch. Questions he’d been warned never to ask by the mysterious benefactor who supplied them with the recipe.
Rob, however, hadn’t cared where this new, more powerful form of proxy came from nearly so much as he cared about the money they were making from it. Rob had even talked about getting a licence to set up a legal proxy business, once the proposed changes to the law came about.
Until then, the only legally allowed use of proxy had been by the police and by disability charities. But things had been getting more relaxed, especially after Pandemic Three scared almost everyone off international travel.
Just like that, proxy had gone from being perceived as sleazy, immoral and potentially lethal to just about the safest way to travel abroad without risking a potentially deadly infection since, after all, it didn’t require either user to actually go anywhere.
And proxy, relying as it did on quantum entanglement to create its unique bond between a pair of human minds, could work across any distance. Not that Elijah could have taken advantage of those changing laws, being banged up in the Scrubs by that time.
If he’d just listened to Rob, stopped asking so many questions and been happy to just take the money, he might still be a free man…
…and Rob might still be alive.
But that was his curse, wasn’t it? Elijah thought miserably. He was naturally inquisitive, always asking questions even if nobody wanted to give him the answers. Whatever people didn’t want him to know, he tried to find out. Even if it got him into trouble.
Their unnamed benefactor had been the first person Elijah thought of, when he found himself standing over Rob’s corpse with a hammer in one hand: the weirdest thing was that the man had insisted he didn’t want a share of their profits from selling hopscotch.
And statements like that were just guaranteed to raise Elijah’s curiosity to epic levels.
“So what exactly is it you want from me then, Elijah?” Lorenz asked him.
“I need a skin,” said Elijah, his thoughts returning to the present. “Someone on the outside, so I can try to find out who’s got it in for me.”
Davie sniggered. “You couldn’t afford something like that.”
“Shut it, you daft twat,” Lorenz said over his shoulder without once taking his eyes off Elijah. “Proxy dealing is as good as printing your own money.” He focused on Elijah with renewed and greedy interest. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
“We did all right,” Elijah said guardedly.
“Because,” said Lorenz, “as Davie so rightly points out, it’s going to cost you. Want to know how much?”
Elijah shrugged like that was the last thing he cared about, but his blood cooled a couple of degrees when Lorenz named a figure.
He could afford it, but only just.
“It’s a lot, I know.” Lorenz tried to look sympathetic, but he was clearly struggling to keep a feral grin off his face. “But it’s not like you’ve got much of a choice, is it?”
CHAPTER
EIGHT
STACY
“Miss Cotter?” The doctor closed the door of the private ward behind him. He glanced at a wall-monitor above her bed and then returned his attention to Stacy. “How are you feeling today?”
The doctor looked the young and bright-eyed type, thought Stacy, like a college girl’s wet dream of perfect husband material. His name tag read Doctor Taft.
She groaned and moved her one arm that wasn’t immobilised by heavy bandaging. Even the simple act of breathing created a sensation like razor-edged daggers sliding beneath her ribs.
Bright and unwelcome sunlight streamed through broad windows, and someone had arranged cut flowers in a vase on a table next to the window while she had still been asleep. A shelving unit filled with unread paperbacks stood next to a leather couch in the far corner. Apart from the bed, it looked more like someone’s lounge than a hospital room.
She had relived the long tumble onto the balcony of the arcology over and over again in her dreams. Landing on bushes and freshly turned soil rather than hard concrete had saved her life, but the awful, racking pain she’d endured waiting for an ambulance crew to arrive—far beyond anything she might have believed possible—would remain with her forever.
“I want more morphine,” Tracy croaked, the words finding their way past shards of diamond glass that had taken up residence inside her ribcage.
Doctor Taft glanced again at the wall-monitor above her bed and put on a professional, if not entirely convincing, smile. “You’re about ready to get out of that bed and start walking around again, Miss Cotter,” he said. “More morphine would be a bad idea. Frankly, you’ve been extraordinarily lucky not to have suffered far worse injuries. Anyway,” he added, “I thought you’d like to know that we’ve been keeping your father up to date on your progress.”
Stacy coughed weakly. “I’m sorry, did you say my father?”
“Mr Markov, yes.” The doctor frowned, wondering, perhaps, if she had suffered more than just a bad concussion from her fall. “We had this conversation just yesterday, Miss Cotter.”
She blinked at the doctor. “We did?”
“You weren’t so lucid at the time, admittedly.” Doctor Taft touched a stylus to an electronic tablet he grasped in one hand. “A physical therapist will be along to see you in a few hours. The good news,” he added, looking back up, “is that he’s coming to visit you tomorrow morning.”
Stacy’s heart began to pound so loudly she wondered how the doctor couldn’t hear it. “Who is?”
The doctor gave her an odd look. “Your father, Miss Cotter.” He turned back towards the door. “I’ll ask the nurse to come and take your lunch order,” he added over his shoulder.
“There’s someone I’d like to call,” Stacy said in a rush. She did a bad job of hiding her panic. “Can I have my bracelet, please?”
The doctor, when he turned back around, had an evasive look on his face. “We really can’t allow the use of bracelets on the premises, I’m afraid, Miss Cotter. They interfere with the equipment.”
This was bullshit. She knew it, he knew it. “Then might you perhaps get me a chip-phone?” Stacy asked, keeping her voice just on the right side of hysteria. “Just a cheap one is all I need. You could allow that, couldn’t you?”
Taft hesitated a moment far too long for her comfort. “Of course,” Taft said at last. “I’ll ask one of the nurses to do just that.”
Liar, thought Stacy as Doctor Taft departed, closing the door behind him.
She tried to remember anything else between falling onto the balcony, being scraped up out of the dirt and put into the back of an ambulance, and…and waking up here. She couldn’t.
Instead, it occurred to Stacy that it was surprisingly quiet for a hospital. One might even think unusually quiet.
She could wait and see if someone would bring her some kind of phone she could use, but once Raphael’s name had been mentioned she’d felt sure beyond a flicker of doubt that they would not.
Nor would they allow her to leave, at least not alive, not if Raphael Markov had anything to do with it.
The silence of the room quickly became oppressive. Then she glanced at the TV mounted to the wall opposite her bed and wondered if she could use it to access the net. If she could, perhaps she could send Isaac a warning.
Fat chance. But she tried anyway, voicing commands.
The screen came to life, but she was hardly surprised when it turned out she couldn’t use it to access the net. The best she could make it do was change channels.
She let her head sink back against the pillows and thought bleak thoughts. The window didn’t have bars, but it might as well have; all the professional manner and lounge-like decoration didn’t make her feel any less of a prisoner.
Could she walk out of here, she wondered? She tried sitting up and felt a sharp pain in her chest. Grimacing, she eased herself back down. And even if she could, what would they do? Keep her under sedation around the clock?
Just how thoroughly were the staff in this hospital, or, or…clinic or whatever it was, under Raphael’s thumb?
She needed to think.
Just then, she glanced back at the television, which had defaulted to a 24 hour news channel, and saw her own face from a few years before displayed slightly above and to one side of the news anchor.
Stacy sat up again, ignoring the fresh stab of pain this brought. She increased the TV’s volume and quickly discovered the story was—unsurprisingly—about her near-death experience.
They weren’t openly speculating about how she had come to be stranded atop the arcology, but neither were they reticent about pulling up old news stories regarding her past misdemeanours.
Stacy fought back the bitter taste in the back of her throat when they displayed pictures of her slumming it in London’s nightclubs when she’d still only been a teenager. These were followed, inevitably, by a recap of how her mother had come to be divorced by Raphael Markov, one of the world’s richest and most influential tech entrepreneurs.
It got worse. Her guts roiled with shame and horror when the next image that flashed up showed her being escorted in cuffs to a police car on charges of proxy-hooking.
None of it would have happened if it hadn’t been for Gabe.
Gabe had been Stacy’s boyfriend, but also her business partner—or so he had liked to tell her. She first met him in a Camden squat she’d crashed in on the night of her sixteenth birthday, desperate to get as far away from her mother and home as possible.
She couldn’t remember who exactly had introduced her to Gabe. Everyone seemed to know him, although it wasn’t until later she learned this was only because he was a proxy dealer. Gabe was popular because he made some people… well, not rich, but better off enough they didn’t have to stay in a squat any more.
All they had to do was rent their bodies out to Gabe’s clients.
In those first few days of their fumbling courtship, it had felt inevitable to Stacy that she and Gabe would become lovers. It was only now, with the perspective of adulthood, that she could see the ease with which he had manipulated her. He’d only been in his early twenties at the time, but to a sixteen-year old runaway, he had seemed impossibly mature and mysterious.
Gabe talked about proxy like using it represented an act of supreme charity and sacrifice. Many disabled people, he explained—paraplegics, the paralysed or the terminally ill—were hungry to proxy with anyone who had a healthy body, even if only for a few hours. They got to run or swim or go outdoors and, yes, he admitted with a sly grin, make love.
And then there were the elderly couples who wanted to experience each other the way they had when they first started courting, with long, smooth-skinned limbs and bodies that responded immediately and fully to every touch and sensation.
And then there were those who were perfectly able-bodied and young, but felt an intense desire to experience each other in the bodies of strangers.
And some of these people were prepared to pay a very great deal of money for the experience.
He’d waited a couple of weeks to make his pitch to her, and after they had more or less moved in together. They could, he explained, make a lot of money from such people.
And it wasn’t like hooking in the old sense, he’d explained—Stacy would never have to sleep with anyone other than him. Instead, they would each proxy with one half of a couple, and let them do what they would inside their own, more youthful bodies. Stacy and Gabriel, meanwhile, would wait out the proxy session in the bodies of those who had paid them for the privilege.
And yes, there were dangers—which was why it was illegal. Clients might literally murder you while they were in your bodies, or inject you full of dangerous drugs or go on a rampage.
But such things, Gabe had assured her, were rare. Very, very rare.
And it had been fun, too, for a while anyway. But there had been another reason Stacy agreed to the arrangement—one she had never told her new lover.
When she had still been very young, Stacy had managed to convince herself that her mother, Amy, had done something to cause her father to push them both out of his life. If she could only speak face to face with her father, Stacy had come to believe, she could find out why he’d gone to such lengths to reject his own daughter when she had been hardly more than a baby.
Not that she hadn’t already tried asking him. She had even written letters to Raphael Markov following her parent’s separation, without her mother ever knowing. She never received an answer.
Barely a year before she first met Gabe, Stacy had travelled to the London offices of Telop hoping to find Raphael there, only to be gently rebuffed by the security staff. They had called her mother, and Amy had been forced to come and pick Stacy up, warning her the whole way back home to never try such a thing again.
Most of the people Gabe arranged for them to proxy with were rich. They had to be, to afford the prices he charged. And a very few of them, she quickly realized, moved in the same circles as her father.
When she and Gabe proxied with their clients, they most often found themselves occupying their client’s bodies in a locked hotel room that had been rented for that specific purpose. Most often, the door was locked to prevent them going walkabout in their borrowed rich person’s skins.
But on one particular occasion, Stacy had discovered her father was speaking at a conference held within the very same hotel she and Gabe found themselves in while waiting out a proxy session.
Picking the hotel room’s electronic lock was easy, once Gabe showed her how. Still wearing the skin of a woman twenty years her senior, Stacy went in search of Raphael, but it still proved impossible to get anywhere near him. Security was tight and ever-present, and the skin was no one her father would recognize.
But if she could find the right client in the right place, perhaps she could finally get close enough to him to ask the question that had filled her dreams and nightmares ever since she was a little girl.
