Read Online The Eternal Prison by Jeff Somers - Free Book Online Page B

smart puppets from diverse locations. I didn’t even know if there was a real, human Richard Marin left or if he was totally digital. You could kill hundreds of Marins and he’d still be there, like mold.
     
“This is the guy?” Neely said, staring at me. “He looks like a fucking slug, boss.”
     
Ruberto smiled down at his desk. “Play nice, please.”
     
Neely shrugged, arching his thick black eyebrows. The hum of the hover was lulling, a steady rhythm that tugged at you. “Okay,” he said, turning back to me. “Marin is the cops, right?
     
I mean, we don’t have anything against the System Security Force—good people, just about every one of them.”
     
I smiled wide. “Speak for yourself,” I advised.
     
“Hard people doing a hard job,” Ruberto murmured softly, like he was cooing to his lap desk.
     
Neely spread his huge, supple hands, the sort of hands that would be good at strangling you. “It’s Marin. He’s the poison. He’s the problem here. He’s fucking power mad—excuse my language, boss.”
     
Ruberto nodded absently.
     
“He thinks he got elected mayor of the whole fucking System,” Neely went on, shooting his cuffs and shrugging his shoulders inside his expensive suit. “Cut that motherfucker’s head off, and the cops go back to just bein’ cops, right? Sorry again, boss.”
     
I leaned forward, putting my elbows on my knees. “You can’t kill Marin,” I said slowly. “You kill him, three more crawl out of the shadows to shoot at you.”
     
Ruberto chuckled, but Neely just gave me those blank eyes. “Right, if you go after the fucking avatars like an asshole.” He leaned over to his side and extracted a sheet of shiny electric paper from a thin briefcase. He handed it over to me, the sheet catching the light and reflecting a shimmering silver back at me. As I took it in my numb hands, it made a metallic, flexible noise, the print blurring and refreshing at odd angles. I snapped it back into shape but didn’t look at it, keeping my attention on Neely, who was the sort of guy who lunged at you when you were distracted.
     
“You need to go after the Prime,” he said, nodding at the sheet. “Kill the Prime, and every fucking avatar on the streets of the System will hit the bricks.”
     
“Problem solved,” Ruberto said, nodding his head slightly.
     
“The avatars have a complete template of the controlling intelligence, of course,” Neely said. “But they don’t have any kind of real-time backup—they’re flat templates. Snapshots. Everything gets fed back to the Prime, and the Prime issues all the commands. The avatars can function on their own, of course, but without the Prime there is no coordination. You’d suddenly have a thousand Director Marins scattered everywhere, little puddles of authority.”
     
“Chaos,” Ruberto murmured.
     
“Anarchy,” Neely echoed.
     
I glanced down at the sheet, flipping through the specifications quickly with curt gestures. “Why can’t you go after the Prime remotely? Hack it?”
     
“Independent network,” Ruberto muttered, hands moving delicately.
     
“Independent network,” Neely echoed, spreading his hands, jewelry flashing. “Dedicated infrastructure; unique handshakes and encryption; heavy-duty, rolling security. The rest of the System could go dark, and Marins would still be running around. Marin doesn’t share bandwidth. You have to take out the Prime.” He leaned back. “Take out the Prime, and the SSF is headless.”
     
“Order is restored,” Ruberto said quietly.
     
“Problem solved,” Neely finished.
     
We all sat there in silence for a moment. I flipped through the specs again. “This Prime unit is in Moscow. Fucking Russia? ” I was never going to be free of the Ivans.
     
Neely nodded. “Fucking Moscow. SSF HQ is New York; Marin decided it was best if Internal Affairs was headquartered as far away as possible. The Kremlin was fortified during Unification; it’s as tough a nut to crack as you’ll find, so he settled in there, when he’s not on the