Burning Violin

"Is this going to hurt?" Crow asked.

 

"We're not barbarians." The cyborg said. "And by the way, you can call me Sam. This should take about ninety minutes. Want to see your options?"

 

Crow nodded and Sam pulled out an array of arms hanging on a rack like a dry-cleaner's, though with a butcher shop's inventory.  Crow hemmed and hawed a bit and then selected one with precision electronic tools built into the finger tips. "Never have to go looking for a soldering iron from now on."

 

Sam and Rebecca smiled. "Always look on the bright side, I guess." She said. "But wouldn't you rather have one that blends in a bit more? They're a lot more expensive, but one like mine might draw less attention, make you feel more comfortable."

 

Crow shook his head. "I'm done giving a damn about that."

 

Sam took Crow's arm off at the shoulder after a topical anesthesia that made his entire arm feel as if it wasn't there. He looked away anyway when the blade bit into his skin and almost vomited when he felt the pressure of the ball wrenching out of the socket. No pain, but an unbelievable pressure that made him feel like his entire body was snapping in half. Crow started to turn his head to look, but Rebecca caught his face in her hands and shook her head.

 

"It's better not to see. Trust me." She said and Crow believed her, although his eyes still wanted to twitch over and look.

 

Sam finished and threw a sort of switch on the back that caused Crow to jolt up in his seat. He looked then at his new arm, and found that he could not think of it except as his own arm shoved into some sort of obscene glove. When he tried to move his new fingers they spasmed and refused to stop until he thought very hard about it indeed. Crow tried to move it with as little will as he possible could and found that it moved more normally then, almost like the circuits had been tuned to too sensitive a level and had to be dealt with gently.

 

"You'll want to be careful with it a few days." Sam said. "It takes quite a bit of getting used too. And I probably don't have to tell you this, but now you'll need to be careful about what normie bars you step into instead of which cyber bars might be dangerous."

A heavily modified cyborg stood nude but for a loincloth in the middle of the room. Masses of flesh clung to a frame of gleaming metal like still-living shish kebobs. Eyes with no whites - the irises had been expanded like glittering jewels through the entire orifice - stared out with no lids from an androgynous angel face plastered onto a metal and plastic skull. It smiled at Crow, revealing double-rows of tiny sharp teeth like a fish. Hands with eight delicate fingers each gestured for Crow to come closer.

 

"Come then, I understand this is your first modification?" It asked in a voice odd because it was so calm and normal. Crow nodded and stepped forward tentatively, heart thumping and unable to tear his eyes away from the monstrous cyborg or the array of circular blades.

 

The cyborg nodded. "I have say it is quite an honor. Making the first cut is like taking someone's virginity. It is unique for every one. It happens but once."

 

"What was your first mod?" Crow pressed the question through a saharan throat.

 

The cyborg's eyes narrowed and its face darkened. He turned away and fiddled with some of the machinery. A bit of equipment released gas with a hiss. "I was one of Alejandro's Ten Thousand." He said in a low voice. "I went to sleep in the camps and woke up a soldier."

 

"Full body?" Crow asked. He had heard legends, read the horror stories, but it all had the flavor of myth at this point.

 

The cyborg shrugged. "Close enough. It was rape. And they wonder why the dog turned on the master." The cyborg straightened and turned with a forced smile and waved up and down his body. "All of this though has been my own choice, nothing remains of what they did. There is only one bit of my original self left at this point."

 

Both Crow and Rebecca automatically looked down at the loin cloth and the cyborg guffawed. "No, that will put a horse to shame now." He tapped lightly on his skull. "My mind is my own. That we never replace, only modify ever so gently."

 

"It's what separates you from sentis." Crow said. "Artificial body, natural brain, cyborg. But a senti is a senti even if you put the brain in a natural body. Is that right?"

 

The cyborg sniffed. "We may be unnatural bastards, but they are monstrosities. Some lines should not be crossed."

 

Crow forced down the arguments that sprang to mind, the hypocrisy of a nine-tenths metal man insisting that it was the tenth he still had that mattered, how that reasoning was no different except by degree from those that insisted all the tenths should be natural flesh and blood. He eased himself into the chair.

Rebecca noticed the direction of his gaze. "Plumage." She said. "I have a neuro switch that controls the effect." She grimaced. "So I can pass in either world, as it were."

 

The bartender approached and waved Crow to come with him. "Through that unmarked door, and down the stairs. There will be men waiting for you."

 

"And then I see the Duke." Crow said, not a question.

 

The bartender nodded. "That was the arrangement."

 

Crow downed the rest of another martini and stood on legs weak and wavery with more than just an excess of alcohol. He took Rebecca's offered arm and they went to the door.

 

"What's going on?" Rebecca asked.

 

"I believe the Duke has a lead on Alexander. The Duke will only see cyborgs. Ergo, I am going to the cybparlor in the basement." Crow summed up.

 

Rebecca blinked. "So you're getting work done. Just like that. After all your preaching at me?"

 

Crow shrugged. "He's my son." He shifted his neck. "Let's get this going before I lose the stones."

 

The stairs were brightly lit with bare halogens hanging from the ceiling that forced Crow's eyes down to the stairs themselves. Too crisp shadows moved with them along the deep blue marble stairs, threaded with veins of silver and gold. Black rubber runners kept the stairs from suicidal slickness. At the foot of the stairs a corridor continued into solid darkness that hung like a fog at the point the halogen beams did not reach. Crow paused and continued on.

 

After a few tentative steps, his eyes began to adjust and Crow realized that a soft blue glow emanated from the walls, ceiling and floor, moving like something living.

 

"It's an aquarium." Rebecca gasped. "It's a tube of glass through an aquarium."

 

The shapes and colors fitted into focus for Crow. "Bioluminescence." He said. "Things from the depths of the sea." He frowned. "There must be enormous pressure on that glass."

 

"Then take soft steps." Rebecca said.

 

The corridor terminated at a revolving door with windows painted black. Rebecca and Crow stepped through together and emerged into an room of white enamel and stainless steel. Vats lined the walls, filled with vomit colored fluids that seemed to boil around bits and pieces of body parts. Eyes stared out at them with a vacancy that was not quite dead, not quite conscious. A padded reclining chair from a dentist's office sat in the middle of the room, surrounded by all manner of mounted instruments and spotlights. Diamond edged circular saws grinned at Crow with sparkling teeth.

"Downstairs." The bartender said. "The best on the west coast." His confusion was palpable. The script was not being followed.

 

"Then get somebody down there to warm up the machines. Left arm enough?" Crow asked. The bartender nodded. "How long will it take them to get stuff cranking?"

 

"An hour." The bartender said. "Perhaps a little longer on such short notice."

 

Crow nodded. "Then get it going. And get me my martini, already." He snapped his fingers and the bartender slipped into automatic motion, pulling out a highball glass and pouring from two tubes in his left arm.

 

Crow pulled out his cell phone and called Rebecca. "Yeah, I'm at a bar in San Francisco, block from the hotel. Can you be here in less than an hour? Yeah it's an emergency of sorts." He smiled. "I just need you to hold my hand while I get some ink done."

 

Crow nursed his drink for most of the hour and then as nerves began to waver, he downed a trifecta of shots: vodka, whiskey, rum in quick succession. Liquid heat and courage spread through his veins. The clientele had picked up in the last hour as cyborgs wandered in every few minutes, although none seemed to leave. Crow drew a few eyes but not that many, the violent racism was more for keeping out the tourists, he supposed. The trio kept a close eye on him even so, but they were kept in rein by the bartender who called upstairs a couple more times during the intervening time, but only got a more perturbed look on his face each time.

 

Part of Crow wanted them to fold, but a vocal minority of his mind was rooting the other direction. It was the perverted part of his mind that everyone had and everyone kept hidden. It was the part that hoped for bad news just because it would be so much more entertaining than the dullness of what was expected.

 

Rebecca walked in the door after forty-five minutes and drew appreciative stares from the assorted denizens of the bar. Crow sighed in relief and waved for her to sit down.

 

"What are you doing you idiot?" She hissed. "They kill people like you in places like this."

 

"Yes, but the idea is that soon I will be people like them instead of people like me." Crow said, sounding much more drunk than he thought he actually was.

 

Rebecca's arms were bare in an all leather outfit that looked sprayed on more than worn. Intricate glowing tattoos in all colors twined up her arms and terminated at the shoulder, where the invisible seams were. The lines of the tattoos were raised, like wire pushing up from under the epidermis, and in places light flowed like liquid.

The bartender looked both ways and leaned in close again, face so smooth with collagen it looked like a bad senti skin job. "Normie's ain't welcome here." He said and nodded to a back corner. "Fellas back there really don't take kindly to it." Crow glanced and saw a trio of cyborgs so enhanced with exaggerated limbs and neuro-muscular implants that they looked more like ogres than men.

 

Crow turned back. "Two questions. Do you have the ear of the owner of this joint? And is he upstairs right now?"

 

The bartender cocked a head and raised a hand up to the trio in the corner who were already standing. They sunk back down with loud grumbling. Crow resisted the tug of a small smile. He should have been a gambler. He loved this rush.

 

"What business do you have with the Duke?" The bartender asked in a tone that implied that the quality of the answer would determine whether the trio was summoned again.

 

"I am Crow Daedalus." Crow said. "That name should carry a little weight with the Duke, even if weren't for the fact that someone from here called me last week and did me a great service. That service gives me reason to believe I could be some use to the Duke, and would like him to be informed of my presence, and a meeting proposed."

 

The bartender stared at Crow and then touch a button embedded deeply in the flesh of his neck. Crow saw the bartender's lips twitter as he subvocalized over a microphone no doubt surgically implanted in his lip. Consternation and then bemusement passed over the cyborg's face. His eyes refocused on Crow and his hand dropped from his neck.

 

"The Duke will see you, provided you meet his entrance requirements." The bartender said with a chuckle. "If you are a cyborg you may enter, else you must leave."

 

Crow stared at the bartender with as much fury as he could muster in his eyes, and then accepted that this was a lackey, a relay, an instrument no more pliable to argument than the radio signal used to make the call in the first place. The bartender's arm started to raise to summon the trio to remove Crow from the premises obscenely worse for the wear when Crow looked back up from the bar and met the bartender's eyes.

 

"Never bluff a man with nothing left to lose." Crow said. "He's not folding as long as he breathes." He held up his own hand to stop the trio and was only mildly surprised to see them obey. Command is ninety percent confidence. "Do you have a cyberparlor in this joint?"

I've got a beautiful stack of scanned letters that passed from one person to another all the way from the nineteenth century down to my mother. They're handwritten, in a variety of scrawls. Text meanders tightly down and around the oddly sized pages, filling up every spare bit of the margins in a spiral. Paper was valuable enough that the letter wasn't done so long as blank space remained. There are all sorts of interesting observations, bits and pieces of day to day life: a mention of a doctor doing what he could for cancer, the off hand reference to "the change of life," the descriptions of the journey in a wagon train west, the oddly poetic description therein of looking back as they reached the top of a pass "we could see everything and there was nothing."

Half of what we know about authors and historical figures is derived from their collections of correspondence, volumes stuffed full of their love letters, rants, and confessions of doubt. Even more of what we know about normal people is from such tidbits of correspondence. It's first person history, candid shots of what would become history, written by people who were there who did not know that the spotlight would eventually be upon their words. People who never were asked their opinions, never wrote great works for immortality, their words still echo because a little scrap of paper on which they jotted a note five hundred years ago chanced to survive in a crack between the bricks in a basement. The greatest hole in our knowledge of history is in the every day lives of normal people.

Today's citizens, for all the bemoaning of the death of letter writing, are the most literate citizens in the history of the world. With the electronic revolution, people en masse write more than they have ever written before. Millions of people transcribe their every heart break, professional decision, emotional connection, meal, and political opinion onto blogs and webpages for posterity. Sure, ninety percent of it is crap, but so is ninety percent of everything.

The problem is that so much of it is stored in a terribly vulnerable manner. I don't mean that it is in electronic form, but that it is stored nowhere except the hard drives of private for profit companies. If Facebook goes bankrupt and trashes its hard drives because of privacy laws, we will as a society lose a vast and unedited window into the lives of a certain people at a certain time. With correspondence shifting almost completely to email, there will not be the odd stack of kept letters granting a glimpse into the past. A few computer geeks might have the wherewithal and motivation to backup and archive their emails for decades on end, but the reality is that almost all email in its current incarnation is so much dust in the wind as far as history is concerned, little more resilient to the passage of years than a message shouted across a room.

I do not have a good answer, any solutions that jump to mind merely run into the iron walls of privacy laws, any proposed archives would have to jump through the hoops of getting varied private companies to invest in something for which there would be no profit, or rely on individuals donating their private electronic correspondence. Perhaps some good will come out of Echelon at least, so long as the Feds are archiving away everything that they are reading.

It took five minutes to back track the number to an office building in down town San Francisco. Crow pulled up the address on a map and cocked his head at the screen. He got up and walked back out onto the balcony, sidestepping the dull drops of blood from his fingers. He leaned out and looked down the street to spot the high rise in question about a mile away down the street.

 

A shower, shave, and other assorted niceties equipped by the vending machine down the hall, and Crow felt halfway presentable, although his eyes were still bloodshot and the shadows under them looked like half healed shiners. He trotted down the marble stairs leading into the building, shaking his head at the valet who offered to retrieve his car. The air was very crisp, getting cooler as late afternoon sea breezes drove out what little warmth the sun had managed to add to the atmosphere. Crow shivered and felt a nauseous hole in his stomach where food should have been. He hoped he didn't vomit on whoever he met.

 

The high rise was a slick affair, all glass and marble except for the crude neon sign of a club that seemed to take up the entire first floor: Upgrade. Crow snorted at the cyborg sense of humor. A gigantic bouncer with spiked titanium hands at the door eyed Crow up and down and lifted the obligatory velvet rope to let him pass.

 

"Not your kinda joint, mon." The man said in a accent so thick with Jamaica that Crow could almost hear breakers behind it.

 

"Cyborgs, right?" Crow asked.

 

"Da clientele do not much like normies." The bouncer said. "Like a brother in a honky tonk dive, know what I say?"

 

Crow nodded. "I'll keep to my self. Just need to speak to someone, and then I'm out."

 

The bouncer nodded, disinterested now that his required warning had been relayed. "No prob, mon. We've got maids to clean up any blood, so it's not my prob if you're wrong."

 

Crow tried to grin and found himself frowning instead. He reminded himself to be quick about it before the place got too crowded. The air was dark, smoky, the way a bar should be. Crow supposed cyborgs by and large and little need for the anti-smoking laws that ruined all of the normie clubs. The bartender was all chrome and slender grace, sleeves cut off of a full tuxedo to reveal arms composed of rubber tubes wound round like a tangle of vines and terminating in a fluid hub that could dispense from any one or combination of the tubes. Walking wet bar. Crow thought.

 

He slid into a seat at the bar, and signaled the bartender, who leaned close to take his order. "Gin martini." Crow said. "No olive."

Crow knew that this was the point when he was supposed to realize that he still had everything in the world to live for, and so much to do, but he was just too tired for that. Exhaustion suffused him, became him mentally and physically. He just wanted to lay down all his burdens and go to sleep forever. At least it would be a hell of a biography, Crow thought, I mean it's not Churchill's or anything but who's is?

 

A gust of wind pushed him a little farther, and Crow leaned a little himself, feeling the warning in his stomach that he was leaning just a bit to far, past the point where it was still under his control.

 

The hotel phone rang behind Crow and his muscles jolted, he started to tumble forward and every limb flailed for purchase. The railings were still rain slick and his feet slipped like a stooge on banana peels. Crow's hand swiped at the roof of the balcony, the undercarriage of the one a floor above, and only succeeded in ripping two fingernails clear off. A gust of wind blew just then, just at the moment when it could help by a bare inch. Crow landed on the top edge of the railing on his breastbone, and that slight bit of breeze had been, he told himself later when he looked for the meaning he needed, just enough to land so the balance leaned inwards instead of outwards. Crow rolled off the railing and thudded to his balcony's floor.

 

Hand on fire, chest painfully bruised, body trilling on adrenaline, Crow pushed himself up and staggered to the phone, answering it finally on his knees. Alexander is that you?

 

"Hello sir, this is a courtesy call to remind you that we will need to charge your account for another night if you do not check out in the next forty-five minutes." A senti voice said to him in perfectly reasonable tones.

 

Crow laughed until his bruised chest punished him with a cavalcade of coughing. He muttered an approval at last between gasps and hung up the phone as he slid to the floor in hysteria.

 

He emerged sometime later with an idea fueled by the phone call. Crow went to the console built into the faux cherry writing desk by the television and logged on to his personal accounts. It took some guessing to get his password right, he never logged in to the damned thing anyway, but then he could see a complete listing of all incoming calls to his phone over the last few weeks. Crow traced a finger and found the call he remembered, the one five minutes before Stillwell had kicked in his door, the one that warned him to hide Alexander. It had slipped his mind entirely over the last week, jostled loose in his memory by the unexpected courtesy call.

"Wars usually begin when two nations disagree on their relative strength, and wars usually
cease when the fighting nations agree on their relative strength. Agreement or disagreement emerges from the shuffling of the same set of factors. Thus each factor is capable of promoting war or peace... When nations prepare to fight one another, they have contradictory expectations of the likely duration and outcome of war. When those predictions, however, cease to be contradictory, the war is almost certain to end." - Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (1988)

 Crow almost argued the point, but saw in their eyes that they would just drag him down town if he did not cooperate. The tale went faster now that it had been told once to Stillwell. The corners of it got a bit rounder, and the telling went smoother. This must be why eye-witness testimony is so worthless, the story changes every time, even when it's branded into your mind with a hot poker.

 

Crow felt like he was acting when genuine tears sprang to his eyes and the tightness welled in his chest. He had told it before and felt like he was hiding something, and so guilt irrationally stung his mind. He suspected the officers could tell, but hoped that they wouldn't do something stupid like think he was making it all up.

 

"Thank you, Mr. Daedalus." The officer said as they left.

 

"Doctor." Crow corrected with a mumble.

 

The officer raised an eyebrow and Crow knew that it had been an intentional mistake, to see if it mattered enough to him to make a hassle, what with his son missing and all. Crow closed the door quickly, saying that he had to go to the bathroom, and tossed the deadbolt before they could get another word in.

 

Crow rushed to the bathroom and all the anger and frustration burst out of his stomach in a solid flow of stomach acid and whiskey into the toilet bowl. He sobbed at the porcelain throne until both eyes and stomach had finished dry heaving.

 

He sat on the porch smoking for the next couple of hours, watching the tides of traffic and people rising and receding. It was very cold this high up, and gooseflesh lined his arms in stubborn rows that he ignored.

 

Crow rolled thoughts of Alexander over and over in his mind during that time, remembering the first time he had walked, his first words, teaching him to read. Crow flicked a cigarette off the edge to tumble end over end to the street below as it occurred to him that many of the memories were by proxy, recorded by Nan and cherished later when Crow got home from work. So much time wasted.

 

He stood and leaned over the railing, thinking how easy it would be to just jump. He's not mine anyway, he's back where he belongs, back with his people. A foot lifted to the first rung of the railing and then to the next, hands held out to balance himself. Wind gusted around Crow, but he was as solid as stone. The city stretched out below, a thousand people swarming, but none looking up to see the man at the end of desperation. The smell of salt and fish reached his nose, the bay mixed with Chinatown. The clouds parted and the afternoon sun blazed from his right, turning the traffic on the Golden Gate into a liquid bar of reflected light. A blue tug rolled over the chop to take a load of tourists to Alcatraz. Crow had never been there, but it seemed familiar from all the movies. Like Alexander. Just another place he had never been but had seen on television.