Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, the Official Pirate Edition Read online

  Now he’s a has-been. He’s still known as the Mad Prince, but for more literal reasons and only to his staff since almost no one else bothers to talk about him. He’s used drugs and alcohol for so long and to such a degree that his emotions, his personality, and his thought processes have been deformed into something monstrous, alien, unknowable. And he continues to get wrecked, every day, all day. He’s paranoid and isolates himself in his estate, Cloud City. He’s certain that they are after him, after his famous self, after his money, after his very skeleton if they can get it.

  He never appears in public, not that the public would care anyway, and spends most of his time reliving old escapades in the sims, jacked into a full-sensory replay of what he once was. Sometimes he uses the commercial studio productions he acted in, romantic comedies and action dramas, but more often he plays home-made recordings, recreating his drunken hijinx and his encounters with women. Time and again, stoned out of what’s left of his mind, he solves the same crimes, woos the same starlet, or fucks the same groupie. He is a man going in circles, his body bloating and inflating like a parade balloon while his mind dwindles away, shriveling to a barely functional, raisin-like core of irrational thought.

  You may wonder why Fat Max is fat at all, why he’s a chronic alcoholic, why he’s even getting old. There are surgical solutions for all of those problems, after all. It would take less than a day at a price he wouldn’t even notice. The fact is, though, that Max is too paranoid to let anyone near him with a knife or a laser. He won’t allow his ka to be decanted because he believes that someone (he’s not sure who—them!) will erase it before he’s safe in his new shell. Or they’ll tamper with the shell in some insidious way, rewire the nerves or screw with the glands, in order to sap his will and turn him into a celebrity zombie who hands over his money and property to his new masters. So, ironically, one of the richest men in the world, one of those most able to afford immortality, is so afraid of someone else killing him that he’s killing himself by refusing to take advantage of modern medicine. My head hurts just thinking about how easily he could buy what I want so badly. I can’t allow that to distract me, though. For some unfathomable reason someone really has tried to kill him and he still has plenty of money to buy big-time protection.

  All the income he made when he was younger has been carefully invested and this nest-egg produces more wealth in a week than most people will ever see in a lifetime. He has teams of brokers and market analysts and lawyers who work long hours to keep it that way, all while taking a healthy percentage for themselves. It’s in everyone’s interests that he continues to prosper. My job, like everyone else’s, is to make sure that he does.

  I’m not sure where he’s wandered off to now, but when I first arrived and Cyril Dancey, the head of the day staff, introduced us, Max looked me up and down with a critical, bleary eye. I couldn’t decide if he liked what he saw or not and Dancey didn’t decode his master’s scrutiny for me, if in fact he had any idea what Prince was thinking.

  There’s a cachet about military service in the security business. Not amongst professionals, but the clients eat it up. For that reason I’m out here at Cloud City dressed as I always am when I’m on assignment. I’m wearing California National Forces green cargo pants and military boots—the same ones I wore in combat, in fact, just in case anyone asks. My hair is still cut so short it’s almost shaved. I’m carrying a sidearm and I have a flechette-launcher on the underside of each forearm. The only difference in my appearance from when I was in the service is that I’m not wearing a jacket. Instead I have on what we used to call, back in my childhood, a wife-beater—a sleeveless T-shirt, also that distinctive shade of Forces green.

  The point of the shirt is not to show off my physique, although that doesn’t hurt, it’s to show off my tattoos. They are my pedigree, and they are the thing the customers most want to see. Down my right bicep are my unit and rank insignias, rising as high as Captain. Down my left are the skill insignias: personal combat, light and heavy weapons combat, infiltration, counter-infiltration, intelligence management, and all the rest. On my forearms are the ones that really count, though, the battle insignias: the Boulder Colorado recon, the San Diego uprising, two New York infiltrations, and on and on, down to the one I wish wasn’t there—Tijuana. That’s the one that always grabs them. What was it like? That must have been amazing! That’s civilians for you. The veterans just turn away. They don’t like to think about it any more than I do, especially the ones who were there. Max may have noticed all of this or none of it—he regarded me, his face unreadable, and then walked away without speaking.

  Dancey’s noticed the tattoos, though. He’s a formal, discreet man, but his eyes repeatedly flick back to them when he thinks I’m not looking. He’s young, maybe thirty at the outside, but he gives the impression of being old. He’s dressed in a dark suit, crisp white shirt, and a blue-grey tie that matches the colour of his eyes. His face is thin and pale, almost grey, although his features have clear African-American markers. As I follow him deeper into the house, I notice that his gait is strangely stiff, adding to the impression of premature senescence.

  “Get the fuck out of my fucking house!” There goes Max now, interrupting my thoughts as Dancey leads me in the direction of the garden.

  “That’s Saul, one of the cooks,” Dancey says, identifying the target of Max’s rage. He lowers his voice politely, but he needn’t have bothered. Max’s attention, all bluster and apoplexy, is focused on Saul like a spotlight, to the exclusion of anything else.

  “What’d he do?” I ask.

  Dancey just shrugs.

  “Maybe nothing. Max imagines things.” He states this matter-of-factly, fully acclimated to his boss’s quirks.

  I turn and watch the show with everyone else.

  “You are finished, fired. You’re lucky I don’t have you assassinated.”

  Max’s huge bulk stumbles down the hall from the kitchen, rebounding off the walls as Saul retreats in front of him.

  “Okay, man, I’m going.” Saul doesn’t look unduly concerned, nor do any of the staff, most of whom watch for a moment and then go back to whatever they were doing.

  “How often does he actually fire people?” I ask.

  Dancey is expressionless.

  “Saul will arrive for work tomorrow morning and Max won’t remember a thing—it’s the alcohol, the drugs. They wipe the slate clean. In effect, all he’s done is give Saul the day off. Since Max won’t remember, I won’t even bother docking Saul’s pay. No one actually loses their job in these dramas.”

  As Saul goes out the door, Max follows him with a parting volley.

  “Watch your back, you treasonous fuck. You aren’t safe!”

  The last few staff members go back to work and I return to following Dancey and thinking about the defenses for Max’s house. These consist of a high-end security system and now my company, Burroughs Oversight. I was only hired after the attempt on his life, but the security system has been in place forever. Carmen, my tech guru, got here before me to examine it and called me with the details .

  I’d expected her to find an expensive off-the-shelf package that would need serious re-strategizing, or at least technical upgrading. But what do you know? With his irrational sense of his own worth, his imaginary star-power, and his sheer paranoia, he has all the bells and whistles laid out in a lean, effective security ecology.

  There are cameras, of course, but there are also sensors for sound and light, including infra-red for body heat. There are motion sensors that detect changes in air pressure and sensors for the bioelectromagentic field produced by a living being’s nervous system. All the sensors have been coded to filter out staff members, as well as non-humans like chipmunks, insects, and stray cats. The entire array of artificial eyes, ears, and nerves scans an area that extends at least a half a click beyond the boundaries of Cloud City without a centimeter left unsurveilled.

  The equipment is orchestrated by, and the sensory data st
reamed through, a top-grade AI which maps the output to known stalking and kidnapping cases, as well as to hypothetical scenarios dreamed up by experts. On top of that, the AI’s templates are updated daily with reports from police forces around the world, from top security research centers at universities and private think-tanks, and from boots-on-the-ground civilian security companies like mine.

  He even has the dogs, for god’s sake, and they aren’t supposed to be available for civilian use. Dogware is a military anti-infiltration system. Its ‘dogs’ look vaguely like real dogs, just very large and abstract ones. They could have been made to look like anything at all, but the researchers who designed the system studied visceral fear responses using a variety of candidate designs and dogs turned out to work the best. They didn’t necessarily provoke the most fear in a particular subject, but dogs are so universally known from direct personal experience—not just from the sims or vicarious accounts—that a dog attack will produce a powerful panic reaction in just about anyone.

  They are built with faux fur over a buckytube skeleton and stand about three feet high at the shoulder. Their claws and teeth are razor-sharp and their reflexes are faster than any human’s, except maybe a Tic’s. They are extremely powerful, feel no pain, and it’s virtually impossible to inflict damage on them. Even if they remain materialized, their core construction is impervious to almost anything: fists, kicks, blows from an iron rod, gunshots, being run over by an earth-mover. The thing is, though, that if you try to hit one, it won’t remain materialized. Instead it will disappear and, before you can draw a breath, it’ll reappear behind you, punch its paw through your back, and pull out your heart. That’s because the dogs are actually nanoswarms—vast armies of molecule-sized robotic devices that can assemble into any material in any form. They can also disassemble and disperse invisibly into the surrounding air in less time than it takes you to blink. In their downtime they float like motes of dust in the air, invisible.

  The trouble is that despite the elegance of Max’s system, despite even the dogware, someone got in. Past the cameras, the motion sensors, and all the other high-end equipment, without setting off the alarm or leaving any recorded image. They took a shot at Max, then fled when he slapped one of the house’s ubiquitous alarm plates. Apparently the would-be assassin didn’t have the stomach to confront the L.A.P.D. Having seen the P.D. in action I didn’t wonder why—I think I’d rather fight the dogs.

  The bullet hit Max in the shoulder, probably a failed head shot—maybe he moved unexpectedly just as they fired, all the assassin’s high-tech expertise foiled by the twitching and shaking of an addict. He roared in pain, flailing and screaming and bleeding all over the furniture, but he lived. Unfortunately he was, as always, drunk and stoned at the time, and by the time he was revived at the hospital he had no memory of the actual shooting at all. The last thing he remembered was the failure of the dogware. In a rare moment of lucidity and sobriety—enforced by his hospitalization—he told me about it as an extremely attractive private nurse puttered around us.

  “Fucking things were at each others’ throats man. I mean fuck. There were hundreds of them out on the lawn, disappearing and appearing all over the place, attacking each other and making these berserk sounds like shrieks. Most fucked up thing I ever saw.”

  Carmen has been trying to trace the problem back to the source, but whoever caused the dogs to turn on themselves burned up their code as they went. All she’s found is randomized gibberish. So whoever attacked Max, whoever I’m supposed to protect him from, is good enough to hack the latest military equipment while protecting their identity at the same time. It gives me a cold feeling.

  I wasn’t hired to investigate, to actually find out who attacked Max or why, just to improve his security architecture, to make it effective against any more attempts on his life. The thing is that as I look at his state of the art counter-intrusion apparatus and think about the person who simply walked past all of it, pitting the dogs against each other as they went, I don’t believe there’s a system in the world that can protect him. The killer failed once, but just barely, and there’s no reason to think they’ll fail again. The more I think about it, the more it seems that the only way to protect Max is to find that killer—that enchanted ghost who could laugh off the dogs—and take them out. The only way to protect him effectively is to understand and then to eradicate.

  “The garden,” Dancey announces, taking me out of my thoughts, then turns quietly to leave me to my business. I look through a broad green arch at the garden. I leave the carpeted hallway and gravel crunches under my feet.

  Three: A Sixteen Year Old Cheerleader Crossed With a Porn Queen

  Cloud City is a paradise. The swooping lines of the main house shine, crisp and white in the Cali sunshine. There are also at least twelve smaller buildings to house staff and guests, plus two small lakes. There is a small but well-stocked art museum, with exhibits borrowed on a rotating basis from major museums around the world. There’s a stable, a horseracing track, a large forested area. The staff uses motorized carts, like miniature convertibles, to get around.

  Despite all of this, it’s forlorn. The vast green spaces are empty except for the staff who tend them. The staff houses are full, but the guest houses are empty. Without guests, and with Max withdrawn into his fantasy world, there’s no one to view the art except the guys who hang the pictures, no one to ride the horses except their grooms, and no one to swim in the lakes at all. Attendants clear the forest floor regularly so you can stroll through it unmolested by underbrush, but no one ever does.

  The main house is a spooky place haunted by a living man. It’d be beautiful if it belonged to anyone else. The furniture is tasteful and subdued. The art is original, varied, and imaginative, and isn’t limited to paintings or photographs hanging on the walls. There are sculptures that are enjoyed as much with the fingertips as with the eyes and there are holo installations by some of L.A.’s brightest young stars. Dancey occasionally identified a piece or an artist as he led me through the house, but I only half listened—my attention was focused on the art itself. Even the air is filled with a subtle fragrance, carried on an aerosol through the ventilation system. Dancey says it’s different every day, usually floral, but today it’s a citrus combination of lime and tangerine, while tomorrow it might be a blend amber and vanilla.

  The carpet is lush and spotlessly white. It has a thick nap, which not only lends a spring to your step, but also apparently helps when Max spills things or throws up, both of which he regularly does. The stained patch can be removed and replaced, the nap of the new piece combed into that of the old, and the appearance of an unbroken expanse of snow-like whiteness is restored with no visible seams.

  The front door opens directly into a huge living room, and one progresses downward by stages through several clusters of furniture. In some places the floor is stepped, in others one glides down a smooth, ramp-like structure. Overall it’s like entering an artficial and immaculate sand dune, an impression enhanced by large, potted tropical plants. In the background, almost as subtle as the house’s scent, is a soundtrack of Max’s own music, mostly soft ballads. In this way the young, sane, sexy Max haunts the house too, but unlike the old, frothing, ugly Max, the young one really is dead.

  The house has a kitchen, which is rare these days for someone with Max’s money. I’d asked Dancey about it and he’d answered expressionlessly, without betraying his own thoughts.

  “Max would rather mistrust a staff of chefs and sous-chefs than a machine. He can spy on people, yell at them. You can’t bully a machine. If someone is going to try to poison him, he wants it to be a human being—he feels he has a better chance of catching them.”

  After entering through the front door, one can descend into the dune of the living room, or instead one can pass to the right or the left. In either direction there are hallways discreetly hidden by the curvature of the walls. The passage to the left leads to the sleeping quarters, Max’s music studio,
and his unused personal gymnasium. The one to the right—the one along which Dancey had taken me—leads to the kitchen, the security office, and the garden.

  It’s not a garden in the usual sense, but a large, indoor, tropical overgrowth, bursting with flowers, ferns, and even medium-sized trees, all contained beneath a high ceiling of glass panels. There are gravel paths and park benches in some areas, while other areas are carpeted and have clusters of more comfortable furniture: sofas and armchairs. It’s a strange combination of outdoors and indoors which Max created at least two decades ago but never visits anymore and it’s here that I’ll interview Porsche.

  Porsche Prince is Max’s granddaughter. Max picked the name—Porsche’s mother Selena, his only child, was in rehab at the time. Max was never the kind of actor to dabble in the classics. He’s probably never heard of Shakespeare and, if he has, he hasn’t read him or acted in any of his plays, so she’s not “Portia.” She’s named after the car.

  On the surface Porsche seems to be my prime suspect for all the obvious reasons. Max’s fortune is vast to the point of immeasurability. Selena was his only child, and she drowned long ago in her own bathtub, maxed out on vodka and overproof barbiturates while riding the visions of Sunday Best, a hallucinogen known for producing beatific visions. Suicide, not suicide? Who knows? Selena had been an unpredictable wreck from childhood, so it could have been either. Since she’s dead and her ex-husband was cut out of the action with a prenuptial agreement, that leaves Porsche as Max’s sole heir. He could write her out of his will, maybe donate his fortune to charity, but he’s too self-regarding for that. He clings to the notion that something of him lives on in her and therefore his empire must devolve to her. It’s a pathetic miscalculation borne of egotism. There is nothing of Max in Porsche, neither his early artistry nor his later foolish bumbling.