his desk terminal and turned its monitor around so I could see it. “Have a look at this.”
I glanced at the screen. “The report on Joshua Wilkins?”
Mac nodded. “Look at the section on the artificial brain.”
I skimmed the text until I found that part. “Yeah?” I said, still not getting it.
“Do you know what ‘baseline synaptic web’ means?”
“No, I don’t. And you didn’t either, smart-ass, until someone told you.”
Mac smiled a little, conceding that. “Well, there were lots of bits of the artificial brain left behind. And that big guy at NewYou—Fernandez, remember?—he really got into this forensic stuff and decided to run it through some kind of instrument they’ve got there. And you know what he found?”
“What?”
“The brain stuff—the raw material inside the artificial skull—was pristine. It had never been imprinted.”
“You mean no scanned mind had ever been transferred into that brain?”
Mac folded his arms across his chest and leaned back in his chair. “Bingo.”
I frowned. “But that’s not possible. I mean, if there was no mind in that head, who wrote the suicide note?”
Mac lifted those shaggy eyebrows of his. “Who indeed?” he said. “And what happened to Joshua Wilkins’s scanned consciousness?”
“Does anyone at NewYou but Fernandez know about this?”
Mac shook his head. “No, and he’s agreed to keep his mouth shut while we continue to investigate. But I thought I’d clue you in, since apparently the case you were on isn’t really closed—and, after all, if you don’t make money now and again, you can’t afford to bribe me for favors.”
I nodded. “That’s what I like about you, Mac. Always looking out for my best interests.”
* * *
Perhaps I should have gone straight to see Cassandra Wilkins and made sure we both agreed that I was back on the clock, but I had some questions I wanted answered first. And I knew just who to turn to. Juan Santos was the city’s top computer expert. I’d met him during a previous case, and we’d recently struck up a small-f friendship—we both shared the same taste in Earth booze, and he wasn’t above joining me at some of New Klondike’s sleazier saloons to get it. I called him and we arranged to meet at The Bent Chisel, a wretched little bar off Fourth Avenue, in the sixth concentric ring of buildings. The bartender was a surly man named Buttrick, a biological who had more than his fair share of flesh, and blood as cold as ice. He wore a sleeveless gray shirt and had a three-day growth of salt-and-pepper beard. “Lomax,” he said, acknowledging my entrance. “No broken furniture this time, right?”
I held up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”
Buttrick held up one finger.
“Hey,” I said. “Is that any way to treat one of your best customers?”
“My best customers,” said Buttrick, polishing a glass with a ratty towel, “pay their tabs.”
“Yeah,” I said, stealing a page from Sergeant Huxley’s Guide to Witty Repartee. “Well.” I made my way to a booth at the back. Both waitresses here were topless. My favorite, a cute brunette named Diana, soon came over. “Hey, babe,” I said.
She leaned in and gave me a peck on the cheek. “Hi, honey.”
The low gravity on Mars was kind to figures and faces, but Diana was still starting to show her forty years. She had shoulder-length brown hair and brown eyes, and was quite pleasantly stacked, although like most long-term Mars residents, she’d lost a lot of the muscle mass she’d come here with. We slept together pretty often but were hardly exclusive.
Juan Santos came in, wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans. He was almost as tall as me, but nowhere near as broad-shouldered; in fact, he was pretty much your typical pencil-necked geek. And like many a pencil-necked geek, he kept setting his sights higher than he should. “Hi, Diana!” he said. “I, um, I brought you something.”
Juan was carrying a package wrapped in loose plastic sheeting, which he handed to her.
“Thank you!” she said with enthusiasm before she’d even opened it; I didn’t know a lot about Diana’s past, but somewhere along the line, someone had taught her good manners. She removed the plastic sheeting, revealing a single, long-stemmed white rose.
Diana actually squealed. Flowers are rare on Mars; those few fields we had were mostly given over to growing either edible plants or genetically modified things that helped scrub the atmosphere. She rewarded Juan with a kiss right on the lips, and that seemed to please him greatly.