69

The upload chamber looked like an industrial hell—intentionally so, Eduard figured. It made for better broadcasts, a more ominous lesson. The Bureau certainly wouldn’t want the public to watch executions in a soothing, pleasant setting, as when Soft Stone had uploaded herself from the Falling Leaves library.

Two restraint chairs were bolted to the floor at the center of a room lined with metal plating. Obvious rivets looked like bullets stitching the steel wall sheets together. Cables and electrodes stretched like squid tentacles from consoles that occupied one full corner. Like something out of a mad scientist’s lab, the left chair was rigged with conduits that led directly into the computer/ organic matrix.

“What is this, BIE budget cuts?” Eduard said.

The guards, ignoring Eduard’s wisecrack, directed him toward the second restraint chair, the one without direct COM connections. Before long, his mind would be dragged over into the auction-winner’s body in the other seat.

A few interested spectators already clustered behind a transparent wall, peering at him like visitors to an aquarium. “The better to see you with, my dear,” Eduard said. He yanked his arm away from the escort guards and shuffled to the indicated chair without being told twice.

The bristling glassy camera lenses of a holocapture apparatus looked like the compound eye of an insect. COMnews would transmit the spectacle onto public channels. Only a few privileged Beetles, guards, and enforcement personnel would be allowed to watch his upload live and personal. And of course the ghoulish old Madame Ruxton—who had spent much of her wealth to buy the body right out from under him—got a ringside seat.

He wondered if Daragon would have the guts to come and watch, or if he would wallow in guilt and stay hidden until it was all over. Eduard couldn’t decide whether or not he wanted to see his former friend.

In the corridor behind the transparent screen he noticed one burly, squarish escort guard paying particular attention to him, like a hyena. Eduard made a twisted face at him, and the blocky guard turned away with an expression of shock and surprising dismay.

A booming voice poured from the speakers as his sentence was read aloud. The narrator, a professional dramatist, spoke with grim authority. The world was watching. “Eduard Swan, you have been convicted of the murder of Mordecai Ob, Chief of the Bureau of Tracing and Locations.”

A looming PR hologram of Ob shimmered in the air like an accusing ghost, looking brave and handsome and paternal. They had used one of the smiling press images from Garth’s FRUSTRATION debut exhibition.

Eduard saw only the form he had worn so many times, the physique he had kept healthy while the Chief wasted his borrowed body on drugs. At least, he had prevented the similar destruction of who knew how many future physical trainers. Eduard’s would-be replacement, Candace Chu, would never know that he had saved her life.

Unfortunately, he had mucked everything else up.

By stopping to see Garth one last time, by letting himself be talked into trading bodies just long enough to say goodbye to Teresa, he had led to his friend’s certain death—and then Eduard had wrecked his chance to get away.

Ob’s hologram hovered in front of him, silent and accusing, as the mellifluous voice continued from the speakers. “Eduard Swan, you attempted to escape justice and committed numerous other crimes during your flight, any one of which would justify your sentence of upload termination.”

Another string of holographic images paraded in front of him: the blood-flecked face of the slain Artemis, the murdered old man who had been feeding bats from his park bench . . . a rapid succession of faces, bodies he had stolen.

Indignant, Eduard wanted to shout that Daragon’s overzealous Beetles had been responsible for most of the death and destruction—but he was cynical enough to know it would do no good. He was supposed to carry all the crimes on his conscience. The Bureau wrote its own history, and COM promulgated it.

“You will, therefore, surrender your life for the greater good of society and in modest reparation for the crimes you have committed. Your strong body will be given to another person in need, and your consciousness will be erased, your mental abilities uploaded into COM, where all minds work together to process data for the benefit of humanity.”

He remembered Soft Stone’s shining lights, the beautiful images, the quiet music—it had to be for show, something the Splinter monks had concocted to comfort themselves. “How can you be so sure I’m not going to come back out and get you?” he muttered. But he knew that would never happen; despite numerous vengeful vows by criminals facing upload, COM had swallowed them all without the slightest bit of indigestion.

In this place, he expected no cathedrals of data, no shimmering angels to lead him down a golden path. Similarly, Eduard thought the ominous “sweatshop of souls” idea was just another ridiculous fantasy, no more likely than Soft Stone’s cybernetic heaven or somebody else’s hell.

“The final preparations will now commence,” the voice boomed.

No matter what, Eduard was going to be dead in a few moments. That was real, without question.