Noir Read Free Page B

man’s nasopharynx. “That’s the kind of organization we are.”
    “Condition of employment.” Whenever any of the brass spoke, the flunky bounced on the balls of his feet for a moment, as though the invisible leash had been yanked. “Public service sort of thing. Your organs are company property. All the suites and cubes and efficiencies have inbuilt Detect-&-Dissect™ kits keyed to the employees’ vital signs; they drop, you’re popped.” The flunky had settled down, but his quick laugh jerked him up again, marionettelike. “Usable pieces get stitched into deserving orphans.”
    “Why waste ’em?” The one brass rumbled again.
    “True.” McNihil looked the man in the red-rimmed eye. “If nothing else, you could serve them over rice in the executive lunchroom.”
    No laugh or smile. “If we wanted to,” the brass agreed quietly.
    Harrisch, the senior exec, had hung back, letting the lower rankings have a go at the asp-head they’d invited here. Their relative positions on the DZ corporate ladder were obvious to McNihil, just from the density of the swarms of E-mail buzzing around their heads. Some of the execs had only two or three of the tiny holo’d images yattering around them for attention; the bottom rungs had enough that their faces could barely be seen past them. Swatting did no good; every once in a while, one of the junior execs would have to turn away, crouching over in a corner and downing enough of them, muttering quick responses into his Whisper-Throat™ mike, to get a few seconds of relief. Harrisch had none; either the corporation was paying for max’d-out filtration or he was high up enough to have gone on an elite paper-only status. He at least was at no risk of being overloaded, prostrate on the floor and buried under a thickening flock of messages, like a dead cowboy beneath vultures in a Western landscape
à la
John Ford.
    McNihil looked back down at the corpse and poked it with the toe of his shoe. “What was this poor bastard’s name?”
    “Travelt.” The flunky bobbed helpfully at his side. “His name was Travelt.”
    “First name?”
    Silent and unrepeated, the question went around the cubapt’s living space. The execs looked vaguely embarrassed, either from not knowing or knowing and not wanting to admit it.
    A wallet was in the corpse’s jacket pocket; McNihil had spotted the flat rectangular shape. He stood back up, flipping the soft leather open. “William,” he announced, reading it off a company ID card. “In case you were wondering.” The driver’s license was—in McNihil’s vision—a nice overlaid replica of what somebody would’ve been carrying around circa the Eisenhower administration. The tiny photo showed the corpse’s face above an early IBM-white dress shirt and blue-striped tie. In life, the late Travelt had looked like a version-in-training of the older and harder ones standing around watching. At that stage, he’d still looked more human than not.
    McNihil tapped the image with his forefinger. He knew that would trigger the ID codes embedded in the card, over in the hard world beneath the one he saw.
    “Assembling tomorrow today,” spoke a bass-enhanced voice. The words sounded as confident as they would have if the speaker had still been alive. “Add value and evolve—”
    “Whatever.” He flipped the wallet closed. The ID card/driver’s license mumbled for a second longer, then was quiet. He handed the wallet to the flunky, who looked at it as if it were the chilled spleen from the corpse’s viscera. “Obviously not a close friend of yours.”
    “That’s not important,” said Harrisch.
    He made no reply. For a moment, McNihil felt as if the temperature level of the refrigerant devices had seeped out and clamped around his own guts. And from there, across the re-created cubapt’s manicured spaces, through the tall windows and out over the world at large. Though he supposed it had less to do with the dead thing at his feet than