by half. And, interestingly, Hansen had opted for a sort of permanent designer-stubble look; the biological him was clean-shaven at the moment.
Suddenly the simulacrum’s eyes opened. “Wow,” said a voice that was the same as the one I’d heard from the man next door. “That’s incredible.”
“How do you feel, Mr. Hansen?” asked the male technician.
“Fine. Just fine.”
“Good,” the technician said. “There’ll be some settling-in adjustments, of course. Let’s just check to make sure all your parts are working . . .”
“And there it is,” Cassandra said to me. “Simple as that.” She led me out of the room, back into the corridor, and closed the door behind us.
“Fascinating.” I pointed at the left-hand door. “When do you take care of the original?”
“That’s already been done. We do it in the chair.”
I stared at the closed door and I like to think I suppressed my shudder enough so that Cassandra was unaware of it. “All right. I guess I’ve seen enough.”
Cassandra looked disappointed. “Are you sure you don’t want to look around some more?”
“Why? Is there anything else worth seeing?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Cassandra. “It’s a big place. Everything on this floor, everything downstairs . . . everything in the basement.”
I blinked. “You’ve got a basement?” Almost no Martian buildings had basements; the permafrost layer was very hard to dig through.
“Yes,” she said. She paused, then looked away. “Of course, no one ever goes down there; it’s just storage.”
“I’ll have a look,” I said.
And that’s where I found him.
He was lying behind some large storage crates, face down, a sticky pool of machine oil surrounding his head. Next to him was a stubby excimer-powered jackhammer, the kind many fossil hunters had for removing surface material. And next to the jackhammer was a piece of good old-fashioned paper. On it, in block letters, was written, “I’m so sorry, Cassie. It’s just not the same.”
It’s hard to commit suicide, I guess, when you’re a transfer. Slitting your wrists does nothing significant. Poison doesn’t work and neither does drowning. But Joshua-never-anything-else-at-all-anymore Wilkins had apparently found a way. From the looks of it, he’d leaned back against the rough cement wall and, with his strong artificial arms, had held up the jackhammer, placing its bit against the center of his forehead. And then he’d pressed down on the jackhammer’s twin triggers, letting the unit run until it had managed to pierce through his titanium skull and scramble the material of his artificial brain. When his brain died, his thumbs let up on the triggers, and he dropped the jackhammer, then tumbled over himself. His head had twisted sideways when it hit the concrete floor. Everything below his eyebrows was intact; it was clearly the same reptilian face Cassandra Wilkins had shown me.
I headed up the stairs and found Cassandra, who was chatting in her animated style with another customer.
“Cassandra,” I said, pulling her aside. “Cassandra, I’m very sorry, but . . .”
She looked at me, her green eyes wide. “What?”
“I’ve found your husband. And he’s dead.”
She opened her pretty mouth, closed it, then opened it again. She looked like she might fall over, even with gyroscopes stabilizing her. “My . . . God,” she said at last. “Are you . . . are you positive?”
“Sure looks like him.”
“My God,” she said again. “What . . . what happened?”
No nice way to say it. “Looks like he killed himself.”
A couple of Cassandra’s coworkers had come over, wondering what all the commotion was about. “What’s wrong?” asked one of them—the same Miss Takahashi I’d seen earlier.
“Oh, Reiko,” said Cassandra. “Joshua is dead!”
Customers were noticing what was going on, too. A burly flesh-and-blood man, with short black hair, a gold stud in one ear, and arms as thick around as most men’s legs, came across the room; he clearly worked here. Reiko Takahashi had already drawn Cassandra into her arms—or vice versa; I’d been looking away when it had happened—and was stroking Cassandra’s artificial hair. I let the burly man do what he could to calm the crowd, while I used my wrist phone to call Mac and inform him of Joshua Wilkins’s suicide.
FOUR
Detective Dougal McCrae of New Klondike’s Finest arrived about twenty minutes later, accompanied by two uniforms. “How’s it look, Alex?” Mac asked.
“Not as messy as some of the biological suicides I’ve seen,” I said. “But it’s still not a pretty sight.”
“Show me.”
I led Mac downstairs. He read the note without picking it up.
The burly man soon came down, too, followed by Cassandra Wilkins, who