Noir Read Free Page A

their genitalia, where the nerves were clustered thick enough for almost instantaneous readout. Stuff like that gave a whole new meaning and impetus to the old yuppie concept of networking; less reliable rumors talked about social events jammed tight with suits, all of them shaking hands and exchanging business-card data with each other until their faces shone like rain-wet stoplights and the smell of semen hung in the heavy-breathing air. McNihil didn’t care to give any of the people in the room even part of that kind of thrill.
    “I knew it.” Harrisch looked disgusted, as though the spit on the window were some personal graffitied message about the nature of the universe. “We shouldn’t have asked you to come here.”
    “See? I told you.” McNihil turned all the way around, so he could speak right into the face of the DZ flunky, who’d materialized at his elbow. “Fine by me. I’m gone.” He pushed past both men and headed for the cubapt’s door.
    “But as long as you’re here.” Harrisch snagged him by the arm anddeflected him toward the group of other men at the center of the living space. They were all standing around something that looked like a bundle of rags at their feet. “You might as well let us know what you think.”
    Not rags; it never was. Not when the bundle was lying in the middle of a medium-to-expensive gray carpet with tasteful black flecks woven in. Laundry, dirty or not, always migrated to the corners of rooms. Nobody ever stood around laundry or rags, watching with carefully blank-to-hostile expressions as some intruder was steered their way. Two of the suited execs stepped back, partly in deference to their boss’s approach, mainly to let McNihil see what was lying there.
    Which was what he’d expected to see. At least the gaze in the filmed-over eyes didn’t broadcast contempt for everything that still had breath in its lungs, that managed to live without benefit of stock options. The corpse stared up at the ceiling with the patient manner of the truly dead, the ones who weren’t going to return on some battery-driven installment plan. An adult male, younger than anybody else in the room, including McNihil, excluding the overeager corporate rep. Christ would’ve been younger than the creaking execs who watched from the corners of their eyes as McNihil bent over the one who now wasn’t going to get any older.
    “What’s all this shit?” He pointed to the corpse’s open shirt. It’d been unbuttoned and folded back, to show the corpse’s chest equally and neatly opened. An incision ran from under its throat to past its navel, terminated somewhere below the elastic waistband of the plain-white, non-designer underpants. The surgical cut might as well have had buttons and holes along its edges; they had been turned almost bloodlessly away from the bones and connective tissues of the corpse’s sternum. Gurgling pipes and tubes, small machinery like burrowing chrome rats, had snuggled in and nested among the various organs. Selectively permeable gas membranes around the exposed heart and lungs; the human bits glistened and shone like the contents of the plastic trays at an upscale butcher’s counter. The resemblance was extended by the drop in temperature—McNihil could feel it just by holding his palm an inch above the corpse’s chest—carefully regulated by the devices’ programming.
    Stuff like that couldn’t be overlaid; no analogues existed in McNihil’s monochrome world. The little machines continued their work, visibly, like some nightmare of a future that had already arrived.
    McNihil pointed to the busy wound. “Why’s he all prepped for transplant harvesting?”
    “That’s just standard procedure.” The flunky had hesitated a moment before speaking up, in case Harrisch or any of the other brass had felt like explaining. “Procedural standards, for the company.”
    “That’s what we do,” said one of the other execs. His voice was a dog’s growl in a