Altered Carbon Read Free

If you have any recurring comp—”
    “I
know. I’ve done this before.”
    I
wasn’t feeling much like human interaction. I’d just remembered
Sarah.
    We stopped
at a side door with the word
shower
stencilled on frosted glass. The
doctor steered me inside and stood looking at me for a moment.
    “I’ve
used showers before as well,” I assured her.
    She nodded.
“When you’re finished, there’s an elevator at the end of the
corridor. Discharge is on the next floor. The, ah, the police are waiting to
talk to you.”
    The manual
says you’re supposed to avoid strong adrenal shocks to the newly sleeved,
but then she’d probably read my file and didn’t consider meeting
the police much of an event in my lifestyle. I tried to feel the same.
    “What
do they want?”
    “They
didn’t choose to share that with me.” The words showed an edge of
frustration that she shouldn’t have been letting me see. “Perhaps
your reputation precedes you.”
    “Perhaps
it does.” On an impulse, I flexed my new face into a smile.
“Doctor, I’ve never been here before. To Earth, I mean. I’ve
never dealt with your police before. Should I be worried?”
    She looked
at me, and I saw it welling up in her eyes; the mingled fear and wonder and
contempt of the failed human reformer.
    “With
a man like you,” she managed finally, “I would have thought they
would be the worried ones.”
    “Yeah,
right,” I said quietly.
    She
hesitated, then gestured. “There is a mirror in the changing room,”
she said, and left. I glanced towards the room she had indicated, not sure I
was ready for the mirror yet.
    In the
shower I whistled away my disquiet tunelessly and ran soap and hands over the
new body. My sleeve was in his early forties, Protectorate standard, with a
swimmer’s build and what felt like some military custom carved onto his
nervous system. Neurachemical upgrade, most likely. I’d had it myself,
once. There was a tightness in the lungs that suggested a nicotine habit and
some gorgeous scarring on the forearm, but apart from that I couldn’t
find anything worth complaining about. The little twinges and snags catch up
with you later on and if you’re wise, you just live with them. Every
sleeve has a history. If that kind of thing bothers you, you line up over at
Syntheta’s or Fabrikon. I’ve worn my fair share of synthetic
sleeves; they use them for parole hearings quite often. Cheap, but it’s
too much like living alone in a draughty house, and they never seem to get the
flavour circuits right. Everything you eat ends up tasting like curried
sawdust.
    In the
changing cubicle I found a neatly folded summer suit on the bench, and the
mirror set in the wall. On top of the pile of clothes was a simple steel watch,
and weighted beneath the watch was a plain white envelope with my name written
neatly across it. I took a deep breath and went to face the mirror.
    This is
always the toughest part. Nearly two decades I’ve been doing this, and it
still jars me to look into the glass and see a total stranger staring back.
It’s like pulling an image out of the depths of an autostereogram. For
the first couple of moments all you can see is someone else looking at you
through a window frame. Then, like a shift in focus, you feel yourself float
rapidly up behind the mask and adhere to its inside with a shock that’s
almost tactile. It’s as if someone’s cut an umbilical cord, only
instead of separating the two of you, it’s the otherness that has been
severed and now you’re just looking at your reflection in a mirror.
    I stood
there and towelled myself dry, getting used to the face. It was basically
Caucasian, which was a change for me, and the overwhelming impression I got was
that if there was a line of least resistance in life, this face had never been
along it. Even with the characteristic pallor of a long stay in the tank, the
features in the mirror managed to look weather-beaten. There were lines
everywhere. The thick