Evolution's Darling by Scott Westerfeld

Author:Scott Westerfeld
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction - Space Opera, Fiction - Science Fiction, Space Opera, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Fiction, Science fiction, Science Fiction - General, General & Literary Fiction, General
ISBN: 9781568581491
Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows
Published: 2000-04-01T03:01:04.714000+00:00

The limo went to ground ten klicks from the hotel. There was simply no flying in Malvir City; that stratum was taken. Mira swore as they crawled through ground traffic. What was the point of unlimited wealth if you couldn’t fly?

Oscar’s last words preyed on her, as frustrating as the slow progress through the narrow, bird-shit speckled streets. This won’t take a minute. Why would he remember that one phrase from months ago, when he couldn’t keep her assumed name in his head for ten seconds? Her pseudonyms were designed by software to engender a certain trust, an I’ve-heard-of-you feeling of familiarity. They were based on ancient historical figures learned about in school and promptly buried deep inside one’s brain: Nel Arm-straw, Mahout Magandhi, Joan Dark. But the pseudonym hadn’t stuck. Just an off-hand remark as she had—as she had removed the internal battery!

She’d said it just before she killed him.

But not the Oscar Vale that had been shipped back to Malvir and re-embodied. She’d said it to the other one. The dead one. She’d disconnected him from the ether power gird and pulled his battery and spiked the blackbox with 2,000 amps/60,000

volts and dropped it in the trash. That Oscar Vale was gone, no question. But some glimmer of him had stumbled into the present. Some winged shred of experience had crossed the air between the twinned entities. She’d never even believed in artificial intuition, and this was positively occult. The limo’s AI politely transpared the roof as they neared the hotel. Its edifice loomed above them, gothic and forbidding.

Maybe she should tell the gods. One of their contract murders had been recorded, however mystically, by a living entity. They would scoff, but they were cagey old bastards. You didn’t see your fourth century by taking any risks. They would order a hit. Probably a job for her. A little appetizer while she waited for the mad inventor who had started all this to be run to ground.

That poor bastard Vale. Copied as if he were some second-rate freeware, crippled in the head, unhinged from time. Visited by the woman who’d killed his double, and now possessed by the ghost of his dead twin.

Bad luck all around.

It wouldn’t be fair to sick the gods on him as well. Just not fair. A depression settled on her as the limo was swallowed by the maw of the hotel’s garage, the mercury lights inside highlighting birdshit on the vehicle’s windows. She wondered if she’d wind up like Vale. She was already damaged goods by any human standard, without a childhood, with voices in her head telling her where to go, whom to kill.

A pretty good definition of psychotic.

And now, on top of all that, she was in a bad mood. This was Darling’s fault, she fumed. He had shaken up her neatly controlled world. Everything had been smooth as glass for her for as long as she could remember. The predictable, constant velvet of luxury travel in a post-scarcity universe always surrounded her like a comforting fog.

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