Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan Page B

an
altogether smoother, less embittered Sullivan. I glanced over Nyman’s
suit and face. Perhaps if the Warden had made his career in storage for the
super rich instead of the criminal element he might have turned out like this.
    “Fine.”
    It got
pretty dull after that. PsychaSec, like most d.h.f. depots, wasn’t much
more than a gigantic set of air-conditioned warehouse shelves. We tramped
through basement rooms cooled to the 7 to 11 degrees Celsius recommended by the
makers of altered carbon, peered at racks of the big thirty-centimetre expanded
format discs and admired the retrieval robots that ran on wide-gauge rails
along the storage walls. “It’s a duplex system,” said Nyman
proudly. “Every client is stored on two separate discs in different parts
of the building. Random code distribution, only the central processor can find
them both and there’s a lock on the system to prevent simultaneous access
to both copies. To do any real damage, you’d have to break in and get
past all the security systems twice.”
    I made
polite noises.
    “Our
satellite uplink operates through a network of no less than eighteen secure
clearing orbital platforms, leased in random sequence.” Nyman was getting
carried away with his own sales pitch. He seemed to have forgotten that neither
Prescott nor myself were in the market for PsychaSec’s services.
“No orbital is leased for more than twenty seconds at a time. Remote
storage updates come in via needlecast, with no way to predict the transmission
route.”
    Strictly
speaking, that wasn’t true. Given an artificial intelligence of
sufficient size and inclination, you’d get it right sooner or later, but
this was clutching at straws. The kind of enemies who used AIs to get at you
didn’t need to finish you off with a particle blaster to the head. I was
looking in the wrong place.
    “Can
I get access to Bancroft’s clones?” I asked Prescott abruptly.
    “From
a legal point of view?” Prescott shrugged. “Mr.Bancroft’s
instructions give you carte blanche as far as I know.”
    Carte
blanche
? Prescott had been springing
these on me all morning. The words almost had the taste of the heavy parchment.
It was like something an Alain Marriott character would say in a Settlement
years flic.
    Well,
you’re on Earth now
. I turned
to Nyman, who nodded grudgingly.
    “There
are some procedures,” he said.
    We went
back up to ground level, along corridors that forcibly reminded me of the
re-sleeving facility at Bay City Central by their very dissimilarity. No rubber
gurney wheel tracks here—the sleeve transporters would be air cushion
vehicles—and the corridor walls were decked out in pastel shades. The
windows, bunker peepholes from the outside, were framed and corniched in
Gaudí-style waves on the inside. At one corner we passed a woman
cleaning them by hand. I raised an eyebrow. No end to the extravagance.
    Nyman
caught the look. “There are some jobs that robot labour just never gets
quite right,” he said.
    “I’m
sure.”
    The clone
banks appeared on our left, heavy, sealed doors in beveled and sculpted steel
counterpointing the ornate windows. We stopped at one and Nyman peered into the
retina scan set beside it. The door hinged smoothly outwards, fully a metre
thick in tungsten steel. Within was a four-metre long chamber with a similar
door at the far end. We stepped inside, and the outer door swung shut with a
soft thud that pushed the air into my ears.
    “This
is an airtight chamber,” said Nyman redundantly. “We will receive a
sonic cleansing to ensure that we bring no contaminants into the clone bank. No
reason to be alarmed.”
    A light in
the ceiling pulsed on and off in shades of violet to signify that the dust-off
was in progress and then the second door opened with no more sound than the
first. We walked out into the Bancroft family vault.
    I’d
seen this sort of thing before. Reileen Kawahara had maintained a small one for
her transit clones on