Her green eyes seemed to dance. “Oh, thank you, Mr. Lomax! You’re a good man—I can tell!”
I shrugged a little. “I can show you two ex-wives and a half dozen bankers who’d disagree.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Don’t say things like that! You are a good man, I’m sure of it. Believe me, I have a sense about these things. You’re a good man, and I know you won’t let me down.”
Naïve woman; she’d probably thought the same thing about her hubby—until he’d run off. “Now, what can you tell me about your husband? Joshua, is it?”
“Yes, that’s right. His full name is Joshua Connor Wilkins—and it’s Joshua, never just Josh, thank you very much.” I nodded. In my experience, guys who were anal about being called by their full first names never bought a round. Maybe it was a good thing this joker was gone.
“Yes,” I said. “Go on.” I didn’t have to take notes. My office computer—a small green cube sitting on my desk—was recording everything and would extract whatever was useful into a summary file for me.
Cassandra ran her synthetic lower lip back and forth beneath her artificial upper teeth, thinking for a moment. “Well, he was born in Wichita, Kansas, and he’s thirty-eight years old. He moved to Mars seven mears ago.” Mears were Mars years; about double the length of those on Earth.
“Do you have a picture?”
“I can access one.” She pointed at my dusty keyboard. “May I?”
I nodded, and Cassandra reached over to grab it. In doing so, she managed to knock over my “World’s Greatest Detective” coffee mug, spilling hot joe all over her dainty hand. She let out a small yelp of pain. I got up, grabbed a towel, and began wiping up the mess. “I’m surprised that hurt,” I said. “I mean, I do like my coffee hot, but . . .”
“Transfers feel pain, Mr. Lomax,” she said, “for the same reason biologicals do. When you’re flesh and blood, you need a signaling system to warn you when your parts are being damaged; same is true for those of us who have transferred. Of course, artificial bodies are much more durable.”
“Ah.”
“Sorry. I’ve explained this so many times now—you know, at work. Anyway, please forgive me about your desk.”
I made a dismissive gesture. “Thank God for the paperless office, eh? Don’t worry about it.” I gestured at the keyboard; fortunately, none of the coffee had gone down between the keys. “You were going to show me a picture?”
“Oh, right.” She spoke some commands, and the terminal responded—making me wonder what she’d wanted the keyboard for. But then she used it to type in a long passphrase; presumably she didn’t want to say hers aloud in front of me. She frowned as she was typing it in and backspaced to make a correction; multiword passphrases were easy to say but hard to type if you weren’t adept with a keyboard—and the more security conscious you were the longer the passphrase you used.
She accessed some repository of her personal files and brought up a photo of Joshua-never-Josh Wilkins. Given how attractive Mrs. Wilkins was, he wasn’t what I expected. He had cold, gray eyes, hair buzzed so short as to be nonexistent, and a thin, almost lipless mouth; the overall effect was reptilian. “That’s before,” I said. “What about after? What’s he look like now that he’s transferred?”
“Umm, pretty much the same.”
“Really?” If I’d had that kisser, I’d have modified it for sure. “Do you have pictures taken since he moved his mind?”
“No actual pictures,” said Cassandra. “After all, he and I only just transferred. But I can go into the NewYou database and show you the plans from which his new face was manufactured.” She spoke to the terminal some more and then typed in another lengthy passphrase. Soon enough, she had a computer-graphics rendition of Joshua’s head on my screen.
“You’re right,” I said, surprised. “He didn’t change a thing. Can I get copies of all this?”
She nodded and spoke some more commands, transferring various documents into local storage.
“All right,” I said. “My fee is two hundred solars an hour, plus expenses.”
“That’s fine, that’s fine, of course! I don’t care about the money, Mr. Lomax—not at all. I just want Joshua back. Please tell me you’ll find him.”
“I will,” I said, smiling my most reassuring smile. “Don’t worry about that. He can’t have gone far.”
TWO
Actually, of course, Joshua Wilkins could perhaps have gone quite far—so my first order of business was to eliminate that