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  • The beginning of the shuckness was in examples such as these. A chopped-up human being was justice, but not necessarily nutrition; the cans with the late pirates’ scowling faces on the label had to have extra soy and fish-farm protein mixed in. Same with the fertilizer, only there the human portion didn’t even hit the fifty-percent mark. As with so many things in life, it was the thought that counted. And the deaths.

  • The same principle applied when it was determined that the agency’s trophies, for maximum educational and moral value, should be living and not just dead things. In the cables lacing up AlexTurbiner’s stereo system, there was actual human cerebral tissue, the essential parts of the larcenous brains of those who’d thought it would be either fun or profitable to rip off an old, forgotten scribbler like him. Conceptually attached to the cables, the old ones he’d already had and the new slimmed-down subwoofer cable that McNihil had just delivered to him, was a lot of audio-nerd gabble about the superiority of soft-’n’-wet neural-based technology for high-end sound systems, coherent full-spectrum wave delivery, optimized impedance matching, the transfer function between synapses quicker than that through the crystalline structure of metal conductors, et cetera, et cetera, yadda yadda yadda.

  • Only… that was bull. The Collection Agency knew it; everybody who worked for the agency, the administrators and accountants, the techs and asp-heads out in the fields, they all knew the basic shuckness of it. At the center of the cerebral tissue inside Turbiner’s cables, running through it like the digestive tract of a mosquito surrounded by its minute insect brain, was a core of thin-film cryo-insulated stabilized quasi-liquid silver. The precious metal-made even more so by the expensive high tech that had transformed it-had the conductive qualities of ordinary silver, enhanced by the mercurylike room-temperature flow and lack of crystalline-structure inhibitory factors. That was why the cables sounded so good, rolled out bass like the shoes of God, made the percussion section’s tubular bells ring like skinny angels. The brain matter scooped from the skulls of copyright infringers had nothing to do-in truth-with the sound the cables made possible, though the agency’s claim was that it did.

  • The brain matter, the still-living remnant of the various pirates, was there for one purpose. To suffer.

  McNihil set down his glass and pushed himself up from the depths of the couch. He walked over to the stereo-equipment rack, being careful not to get in between Turbiner and the full impact of the music. Kneeling down beside the new cable’s boalike curve, he dug another piece of asp-head equipment from his jacket pocket, something no bigger than a handheld calculator with a few dangling gold-tipped wires. As the third movement of the Mahler hammered and steamed around him, McNihil inserted the thin metal probes into the matching sockets toward one end of the cable.

  The device in his hand was a readout meter for the neural activity encapsulated in agency trophies. When the techs skinned down an apprehended pirate, reducing the brain to its essentials, the biggest part of what remained was the basic personality structure and an ongoing situational awareness. The person was still inside the object, alive and conscious. The techs also grafted on to the stripped sensory receptors a minimal interface structure, just enough for the canned scraps of a human being to know what had happened to it. When the techs finished up their jobs, they left the symbolic-manipulation subset of the personality intact, the brain’s language-formation centers still working.

  On the face of the meter, a pair of red LED’s pulsed on, matching those on the cable’s surface, and signaling that the cerebral material inside the cable was up and running. On very rare occasions, a strokelike condition was spontaneously triggered, rapidly reducing the soft tissue connectors to a jellied pulp oozing out of the sheath’s porous wrap like grayed-out strawberry jam. When that happened, there was nothing to do but pull out the trophy and throw it back in its presentation box, return it to the agency labs for the techs to slice out the valuable electronics for recycling. Sad but true: the little bastard would have, in a case like that, escaped the grim immortality that his crimes had earned him. He’d be well and truly, one-hundred-percent dead, the collapsed brain matter fit only for tossing down the garbage chute to join the rest of his previously discarded body.

  This guy’s doing just fine, noted McNihil, as he glanced at the numbers displayed below the hot red dots on the meter. The kid, the business that he’d gone north in the Gloss to take care of, was still there in the cable hooked up to Turbiner’s subwoofer. Or all that mattered of the kid was there. McNihil wondered if the agency’s techs had left enough memory circuits for the kid’s bottled personality to have a sensory recall of his last moments as a functioning, walking-around human being: the smell of the run-down theater’s stale popcorn, the quick and clammy flood of the hydro-gel across his face, the rush of panicky adrenaline as he’d struggled for a gulp of shut-off oxygen. He supposed there might be a memory flash floating around in there, of McNihil’s extended fingers poking an airway for the kid to breathe through, and then of his hands picking up the futilely struggling body and dragging it out of the theater. That, plus the kid’s awareness of his crime, what he’d done to get worked over and reduced this thoroughly, was all that was required, a sad little biography boiled down to its essential, remorseful parts.

  McNihil held the meter up to his ear. The little wafer-thin speaker inside was just loud enough for him to pick up, without intruding on Turbiner’s enjoyment of the louder music, the verbalized outpouring from the soul inside the cable.

  i’m sorry i’m sorry i’m sorry please please please please let me out out out-outoutout dark and cold and wet and stings sorry sorry sorry pleeeeeeeease

  At times like this, McNihil felt like Mr. Scratch in the ancient black-and-white film All That Money Can Buy, with old Walter Huston back in 1941, radiating his evil, bright-eyed smile, the visual counterpart to all that creepy Bernard Herrmann soundtrack music. At least in the movie, sinners had to be tempted by a spooky Simone Simon to wind up as a fluttering moth in the devil’s coin-purse. Nowadays, in this modern world, all it took was one’s own stupidity, the kind above the neck rather than in the groin. McNihil took the meter an inch away from his ear, reducing the scrabbling, wailing voice to a distant, indecipherable noise, as though it were no more than RFI static on the dangling wires. All around the rim, and farther beyond, there were similar little voices, shouting inside their small damnations:

  • Which was the point. A dead trophy did not have the moral and instructive impact of a living one. Living in the sense of there being the essence of the pirate, the skinned-down soul of the copyright infringer, that bit of brain tissue that held the larcenous personality, embodied in some common household appliance, its functions enhanced by the correct employment of what had once been a human being:

  • Toasters were a popular trophy item. There was always a waiting list at the agency headquarters, clients who had put their names down, in case some fool messed with their copyrights. A great sense of satisfaction came with owning a little chrome-and-plastic box with a dial on the side for how dark you wanted the slices to come out-and a little chunk of cerebral matter wired onto the circuit board, making sure that the bread achieved the perfect state of golden crispness.

  • Vacuum cleaners and in-sink garbage-disposal units-those were desired as well. The pleasure there came from the sense of someone who had stolen from you now being reduced to sucking up cat hair and miscellaneous lint from the carpet, or, whenever the switch on the kitchen wall was flicked, sluicing the unidentifiable, mold-covered soft objects from the fridge down the plumbing gullet wired to the pirate’s brain tissue. You want something of mine? Try this. Don’t choke, now…

  • Other popular items: wall clocks, train sets for the kids, pocket appointment books with little built-in calculators (the recipients of those trophies had to be extra careful to keep fresh batteries in them, or the canned brain tissue would go off and start to smell funny), a new and improved version of the classic
“Drinking Bird” toy… the variations were endless, dependent only upon the number of copyright infringers who got nabbed by the Collection Agency.

  • Which were, understandably, fewer and fewer. Which was the point of such draconian measures. This was standard policing procedure, going back to and beyond the hard-core, take-no-prisoners attitude of the old, pre-reform LAPD. Plenty of people connected with the agency, McNihil included, believed the notion went back to the actual, nonmythologized frontier of the American West-or even farther, to the first societies to domesticate and herd animals.

  • The principle being that if the valuable property was widely dispersed-as with cattle across grazing land, or intellectual property digitized on the wire-and therefore easier to steal, the antitheft forces had to amp up the consequences for theft: death to rustlers and horse thieves, trophy-ization for copyright infringers.

  • Draconian measures have something of a life of their own. Plus, the Collection Agency had its own public-relations wing, to make sure that the fate of trophies was broadcast as widely as possible, to make sure that anyone contemplating a little info-larceny would know what would happen to them if they got caught. If you wanted to spend the rest of your life-a long life-as a toaster, it could be arranged.

  • A certain immortality could be achieved, though nothing that anyone would want. Self-destruction has its seductive elements, but this was something else again. Purged of the grosser elements of the human body, the essential brain tissue, and the consciousness and personality locked inside the soft wiring, could last decades, perhaps centuries-only a few of the earliest trophies had crapped out in the field. The agency’s packaging, the cellular life-support technology contained in the cable sheathing and the little sealed boxes inside the toasters, was designed for low maintenance and an indefinite run.

  • Thus, into the economy inside people’s heads, that private assessment of potential risks and benefits, the element of catastrophic price was introduced. Price beyond death, beyond the notions of desirability for even the terminally self-destructive.

  • Nobel prizes in economics had been handed out in the twentieth century for deep thinkers who’d figured out with charts and graphs what cops had known for millennia: people, weighing a course of action, factor in the consequences of success or failure as well as the chances. Amp-up the negative consequences high enough, and you can scare a lot of little bastards from connecting around.

  • In that sense, the Collection Agency dealt in sanctioned terrorism. The agency didn’t have a problem with that.

  I don’t have a problem with that, McNihil told himself. He pulled the probe tips loose from the cable’s readout sockets, wrapped the wires around the meter, and dropped it back into his pocket. Glancing over his shoulder at Turbiner, he saw the old man still absorbed by the music, the third movement dancing ominously to its close. Turbiner looked drowned, as though the audible tide had taken him down to its depths, the strands of his silver hair drifting like seaweed. Those are pearls that were his eyes-McNihil stood up but didn’t move away from the equipment rack and its glowing power tubes, as though cautious of breaking the spell.

  All through the Gloss, in their scrappy or plush flats or other living-spaces, old writers like Alex Turbiner, and composers and musicians, artists and programmers, symbolic manipulators all-they were listening to their bloodily enhanced stereos or dropping slices of bread into their silently screaming toasters, maybe not even thinking about the little thieves canned inside. It didn’t matter. It also didn’t matter whether the writers and others, including Turbiner sitting here, knew as well what a shuck the trophies were. If they knew that the cerebral material, the boiled-down residue of pirates, really didn’t improve the sound any, really didn’t make the toast come out any closer to a perfect golden brown… so what? In an imperfect world, it was not just the thought that counted, but the consequences as well.

  Turbiner raised his eyelids a bare fraction of an inch and glanced over as McNihil sat back down on the couch. “You enjoying this?” One eyebrow lifted slightly higher. “You must be.” Turbiner held his glass up in a toast. “My thanks are hereby extended to you. And my congratulations.”

  “You’re welcome. My pleasure.” McNihil had drained his glass; he let it dangle at the tips of his fingers. The alcohol had slowed his thought processes; it took a moment for the puzzled frown to draw across his face. “Congratulations for what? Just doing my job…”

  “I thought you weren’t working anymore. That you were on the outs with the agency.”

  “Somewhat.” McNihil shrugged. “But I can still do a favor for my friends.”

  Turbiner picked up the remote control from the arm of the chair and thumbed the mute button. The music vanished between one chord and the next, all harmonic progression left unresolved. “Doing favors for people… that’s a nice thing.” Silence had filled the flat again, the contrast making Turbiner’s voice seem louder than before. “You know, in my world… that one I used to write about… there are no favors. Nobody does favors for other people.”

  “I guess we’re lucky,” said McNihil. “That we don’t live there.” He rubbed his thumb across the rim of the empty glass. “We live in this one. Or at least some of the time we do.”

  “Maybe that’s the way it is.” Turbiner gave a judicious nod. He looked like a shabby owl dressed in thrift-store feathers. “Some of the time.”

  The silence thickened, more oppressive than the music could ever have been. Time, stabbed by alcohol, had congealed in the spaces of the flat.

  “Well.” McNihil tried to shake himself free, by leaning forward and setting the glass down on the low table. “I’m glad you like the… present.” It had taken him a few seconds to think of the right word. “Maybe I should be taking off.”

  “Not just yet. Stick around for a moment or two.” Turbiner’s words were clipped and precise, as businesslike as the sharp gaze studying his guest. “I wanted to ask you a couple questions. About the… present.”

  “Like what?”

  Turbiner shifted in the chair, redirecting himself in McNihil’s direction rather than to the point between the main loudspeakers. “The fellow you got this from. The donor, as it might be put.” Turbiner’s voice sounded unusually loud and distinct, as though he were setting each word down in a row of numbered stones. “He was ripping me off, wasn’t he? My copyrights, my old thriller titles, that is. He had some kind of scam going.”

  “What’re you talking about? You know that.” McNihil’s puzzlement deepened. “You were the one who told me about it.” That was true: he remembered getting the call from Turbiner a couple of weeks ago. He tried smiling. “Are you starting to forget things?”

  “Maybe I am.” The voice held no hesitancy, but was still loud and forceful. “Because I don’t remember telling you anything about some guy like this.”

  A few seconds slid by, the flat’s silence weighing upon McNihil’s shoulders. “You know… perhaps I really should leave now.” He felt uncomfortably sober, the scotch doing nothing more than souring the contents of his gut. “I’m not sure where this is headed.”

  “Sit down. It’ll all be over soon.”

  Something’s going on-he felt stupid, even reaching a conclusion that obvious. At the same time, a degree of tension ebbed out of his muscles, a fatalistic relaxation taking over. So many times, he’d been the agent of enclosure, his own voice the click of the lock snapping shut, the last thing somebody heard with any degree of freedom at all. Autonomy fled, control begun; now he was going to find out what that felt like.

  “What’s the deal?” A last measure of resistance was summoned up. “What’s with the weird questions?”

  “I just want to make sure.” Turbiner’s shoulders lifted in a shrug. “About the details.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like your claim that this person-the one you rolled over, the one whose head is inside this cable you just brought me-that this guy was ripping me off. Violating my copyrigh
ts.”

  “That’s not a claim,” said McNihil. “It’s the truth.”

  Turbiner nodded. “And your knowledge of this copyright infringement is based on… what? What I’m supposed to have told you?”

  For a moment, McNihil studied the empty glass on the table, then looked back over at the other man. “You’re saying you didn’t tell me?”

  “No. I’m just saying you can’t prove I told you anything like that.”

  “Well, yeah…” That was true as well. “I’m not in the habit of recording phone calls from my friends.”

  “Maybe you should be more careful about that.”

  Another shrug. “Or maybe about my friends.”

  “Now that’s something-” Turbiner gave an approximation of a smile. “You can’t be too careful about.”

  “I’ve got a feeling that it’s a little late for this kind of advice.” The feeling was actually a certainty, like a rock in McNihil’s stomach. “So why would I need to prove anything at all? About what you told me?” He picked up the glass from the table, remembered that it was empty, and set it back down. “This kid was ripping you off. He told me so himself. He was bragging about it.”

  “What a foolish young man.” Turbiner glanced over at the cable running to the subwoofer, then slowly shook his head. “He must not’ve actually read those titles he was stealing from me. That’s the problem with those collector and dealer mentalities.” He looked back around at McNihil. “If they ever bothered to read the stuff-especially the old noir classics-they’d know that’s how you get into trouble. By not clamming up when you’ve got the chance. You let your mouth run on, you can talk yourself into the grave.” He nodded toward the snakelike cable. “Or worse.”