“I didn’t think there was anyone worse than her.” Yuri knew all about Cancer—so called because she always got her victim in the end; a black ops specialist for the extremely wealthy, but illegitimate, playa. She’d never taken a contract that hadn’t been fulfilled, and never a contract from anyone remotely legitimate—presumably to make sure it wasn’t an entrapment sting. She was feared and respected by everyone in the trade, and the dream arrest of every law enforcement official in the Sol system.
“Don’t do this,” Conrad pleaded.
“If it helps, think of me as Cancer’s opposite. You are my target. When you give me what I want, then—and only then—will this be over.”
“It’s a death sentence for both of us, you understand?”
“Completely. But just so you understand, if these people are not scared of me, then they’re exceptionally stupid.”
“Fuck you! Look, this deal, what you’re asking for, it’s rarer than unicorn shit, okay?”
“What? Snatches for a brain transplant?”
Conrad winced, glancing around nervously. “Stop saying that. I don’t know what the client wants these people for, okay? It’s weird, but it pays well.”
“What people?”
“Low visibility people; that’s what they ask for. People so insignificant no one will ever notice when they go missing. There’s not as many as you’d think, actually.”
“So you don’t know for sure they’re being snatched for a brain transplant?”
“Listen, pal, we don’t exactly have contracts, you know.”
“Okay, so why get so twitchy whenever I mention brain transplants? What do you know? Are they real?” Yuri had to work hard at keeping the enthusiasm out of his voice.
“I just think it through, you know,” Conrad said edgily. “Working out the options. You gotta watch out for yourself in this trade, make sure nothing comes back to bite you. So when I look hard at some of the aspects I have to take into account, that kinda narrows the options, see?”
“All right, how does this work? Exactly? Tell me—all of it.”
“Okay, it plays like this: You’ve committed a serious crime, something the authorities are never going to quit on—like you said, a serial killer or pedophile, totally bad shit. The only way out for you is a fresh body for your brain, just like on the drama games. That way, not even a DNA sample can show who you really are, because cops only ever sample the body, saliva, or blood, semen a lot of the time—but never the brain. So the deal goes down, and I get the word, a request to match, along with the condition that they have to be low visibility. Now what else, apart from a brain transplant, could it be?”
“Right. What else do they want, apart from low visibility?”
“My client gives me a picture. It’s not an actual image, a photo file, or anything like that. This picture, it’s a description, a data sketch. Height and weight combination, skin color, hair color, eye color. That’s the basic parameter.”
“I don’t get it. Why would a criminal want to look the same? Why not go for someone who looks different?”
“Rejection. Come on; that part’s obvious! This is the mother of all transplants, so I figure you have to have the greatest match possible. Physical traits are a good baseline. I see someone who matches the picture, and I start to assess them. Are they basically healthy, are they overweight? Stuff like that. It’s amazing what you get to recognize. Some people are walking beacons for what’s happened to them. Accidents make them flinch at the smallest things. Careful around food, they’ve got allergies. It’s all there in the posture, you know? Once I have a potential, then secondary factors kick in, which are even more important. The biggest is: Is anyone going to care if they vanish? That rules out the rich, and most of the middle class. So I look for what they wear, where they live, what sort of places they visit, the kind of people they’re hanging out with. All these are big indicators of who a person is. So I work it down to maybe ten possibles and get physically close enough to snatch their altme code when they go online—which everybody is, all the time. Once I have that, an e-head friend grabs their digital profile for a real exam. Eighty percent of the time I’m right and they’re nonentities. Dig a little deeper, and they have awkward links—a good job, a big set of friends, things that make vanishing them different. So after you’ve run those filters, you’re left with maybe three or four. Then you step it up a level and go for their medical records. That’s when we find out blood type and any congenital conditions. There’s normally a genome sequence as well, which gets reviewed by specialist algorithms for biochemical compatibility. If they’re optimum, I’ll pass the file on to my client, and I’m out with a nice fat bonus.”
“Your client always asks for medical data?”
“Yes, of course. That’s something else that’s telling me what’s actually going down. I mean, what else could they need that for, right? And I’ll tell you something: Crime isn’t race specific. All these requests have been really varied.”