credenza behind his desk were holograms of his wife and his baby daughter; the girl had been born just a couple of months ago. “I’m looking for a guy named Joshua Wilkins.”
Mac had a strong Scottish brogue—so strong, I figured it must be an affectation. “Ah, yes. Who’s your client? The wife?”
I nodded.
“Quite the looker,” he said.
“That she is. Anyway, you tried to find her husband, this Wilkins . . .”
“We looked around, yeah,” said Mac. “He’s a transfer, you knew that?”
I nodded.
“Well,” Mac said, “she gave us the plans for his new face—precise measurements and all that. We’ve been feeding all the videos from public security cameras through facial-recognition software. So far, no luck.”
I smiled. That’s about as far as Mac’s detective work normally went: things he could do without hauling his bony ass out from behind his desk. “How much of New Klondike do they cover now?” I asked.
“It’s down to forty percent of the public areas.”
People kept smashing, stealing, or jamming the cameras faster than Mac and his staff could replace them; this was a frontier town, after all, and there were lots of things going on folks didn’t want observed. “You’ll let me know if you find anything?”
Mac drew his shaggy eyebrows together. “Even Mars has to abide by Earth’s privacy laws, Alex—or, at least, our parent corporation does. I can’t divulge what the security cameras see.”
I reached into my pocket, pulled out a fifty-solar coin, and flipped it. It went up rapidly but came down in what still seemed like slow motion to me, even after a decade on Mars; Mac didn’t require a transfer’s reflexes to catch it in midair. “Of course,” he said, “I suppose we could make an exception . . .”
“Thanks. You’re a credit to law-enforcement officials everywhere.”
He smiled, then: “Say, what kind of heat you packing these days? You still carrying that old Smith & Wesson?”
“It’s registered,” I said, narrowing my eyes.
“Oh, I know, I know. But be careful, eh? The times, they are a-changin’. Bullets aren’t much use against a transfer, and there are getting to be more of those each day, since the cost of the procedure is finally coming down.”
“So I’ve heard. Do you happen to know the best place to plug a transfer, if you had to take one out?”
Mac shook his head. “It varies from model to model, and NewYou does its best to retrofit any physical vulnerabilities that are uncovered.”
“So how do you guys handle them?”
“Until recently, as little as possible,” said Mac. “Turning a blind eye, and all that.”
“Saves getting up.”
Mac didn’t take offense. “Exactly. But let me show you something.” We left his office, went farther down the corridor, and entered another room. He pointed to a device on the table. “Just arrived from Earth. The latest thing.”
It was a wide, flat disk, maybe half a meter in diameter and five centimeters thick. There were a pair of U-shaped handgrips attached to the edge, opposite each other. “What is it?”
“A broadband disruptor,” Mac said. He picked it up and held it in front of himself, like a gladiator’s shield. “It discharges an oscillating multifrequency electromagnetic pulse. From a distance of four meters or less, it will completely fry the artificial brain of a transfer—killing it as effectively as a bullet kills a human.”
“I don’t plan on killing anyone,” I said.
“That’s what you said the last time.”
Ouch. Still, maybe he had a point. “I don’t suppose you have a spare I can borrow?”
Mac laughed. “Are you kidding? This is the only one we’ve got so far, and it’s just a prototype.”
“Well, then,” I said, heading for the door, “I guess I’d better be careful.”
THREE
My next stop was the NewYou building. I took Third Avenue, one of the radial streets of the city, out the five blocks to it. The NewYou building was two stories tall and was made, like most structures here, of red laser-fused Martian sand bricks. Flanking the main doors were a pair of wide alloquartz display windows, showing dusty artificial bodies dressed in fashions from about five mears ago; it was high time somebody updated things.
The lower floor was divided into a showroom and a workshop, separated by a door that was currently open. The workroom had spare components scattered about: here, a white-skinned artificial hand; there, a black lower leg; on shelves, synthetic eyes and spools of colored monofilament that I guessed were used to simulate hair. And there were all sorts of internal parts on the two worktables: