Slant Page 10

  “Of course,” Mary says. The attending jail clerk and her police arbeiters surround the caretaker.

  “What does it matter?” the man says jauntily as he leaves with them. “If I go to jail, I’ll feel good. I’m happy and at peace wherever I go. There isn’t a thing you can do to change that. Best move I ever made.”

  Nussbaum has left the house and is removing his coldsuit. He brushes his clothes down with one hand and approaches Mary, looking at her from hooded eyes, tired in that way only a PD can get tired: a vital living weariness that carries as much suppressed anger as exhaustion.

  “So, what is he?”

  “He’s happy,” Mary says. She looks around the patio. So precisely and beautifully designed: A wall-rack for soil tools, a cabinet for plant nutrients and soil treatment products, a trellis made of real wood, as yet empty. She imagines a young pretty high comb wife working here, choosing flowers from the EuGene Pool Catalog or creating her own varieties with a home kit.

  “We’ll sober him,” Nussbaum grumbles. “The courts go rough on happy harrys these days.”

  “Anything useful inside?” Mary asks.

  “We have inventory and we can trace all the supplies. We’ve tracked the identities of the victims. Two from Green Idaho, youngsters off the social grid, runaways. Trying to make it by riding the wienie in the big city. Two from around here, all involved in sleaze Yox, all put out of work recently because of the demand for psynthe.

  Mary ports her pad to Nussbaum’s and transfers the interview. Nussbaum watches her solicitously. “What were they looking forward to?” he asks. “What’s it like to change your body and look different?”

  “I was never so extreme,” Mary says quietly.

  “Yeah, but why change at all?”

  “I was short, had fat legs, no upper body strength, wispy brown hair—” Mary begins, then-stops. “Is this idle curiosity, sir, or are you really looking for insight?”

  “Both,” Nussbaum says. “All the boys ignored you?”

  “I thought my body didn’t match my inner self. I wasn’t strong enough and I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. So—I went to a very professional transform surgeon in LA. I was going to apply for a job in PD. I had him design the perfect PD body. He thought it was a challenge.”

  Nussbaum gives her a mild smirk. “And men looked at you.”

  “Sex had remarkably little to do with it, sir.”

  “But men looked at you.”

  “Yes, they did.” She tries to be patient with Nussbaum. She has known many ranks in public defense, and most have Nussbaum’s hunger for the grit. They want to believe that even therapied folks are capable of wide swings in behavior, the extremes of which become PD business. Or perhaps it’s just simply monkey logic.

  A natural, Mary knows, is even more suspect. Nussbaum only trusts himself out of habit.

  He pokes his thumb back at the house. “Men and not a few women would have paid to look at them. Freaks from Mount Olympus having sex the likes of which ordinary mortals can only dream of. Sheiks in Riyadh, commodities trillionaires in Seoul, Party capitalists in Beijing, comb bantams in London and Paris, happy husbands and wives seeking a little variety in Dear 52. More attention than any little girl could ever want. And psynthe transform is legal in forty-seven states, all legal and very, very expensive, too expensive for most.”

  Mary patiently waits for him to finish. Nussbaum lifts his face and gives her a weary PD smile. “I’ll tell personnel you’re moving over to active crime.”

  Of course he wouldn’t ask her, and of course he would not need to ask. He’s good at tuning in. Mary nods. “Thanks.”

  “Tell me more, later, if you’d like,” Nussbaum says. “I’m a son of a bitch for living details.”

  Mary checks out for the day via her pad and thumbs through her touches as she is shuttled back to her hood on the autobus. Not much of interest; she missed her remote appointment with Dr. Sumpler, who works in LA, so she OKs the reskedj for tomorrow, though she is not sure she will make that one, either, if this psynthe case gets complicated.

  The pad’s secure in-box contains a set of replacement prescriptions from Sumpler’s office on her transform reversal; her present stage is regulated by thousands of tiny monitors, similar to those used for mental therapy, and they’ll need replacement in the next few weeks. She feels fine; checks the small bumps inside her armpit, which had been little sore yesterday but today are smaller and not at all painful. In three months she will be stable and can drop all monitors and supplements.

  The streets outside the autobus window are dark, with lights glowing softly along the curbs and overhead. Big cubic apt complexes line the north side, older single homes on the right. Arbeiters are busily taking down three old frame houses to make room for another complex. Soon, she thinks, the Corridor will be as congested as Southcoast. She feels sympathy for just an instant with the isolationists in Green Idaho—and then snaps back.

  In Green Idaho, they would never tolerate a transform, even a reverted transform. She crinkles her nose: Little pus pocket of untherapied self-righteous atavists your daughters come in a rush to the Corridor or even Southcoast and they are so ignorant they end, up in the hands of the freakers, cooked, dead. And you harden your little self-righteous hearts and forget all about them. You think, “Serves them right, they go wrong they deserve—”

  Mary cuts this line of thought abruptly. Her stop is up. She walks down the aisle, past seats filled with temp lobe sods riding north from the towers. A few look up at her; most are absorbed in their pads. She steps out into the night

  The air is cold and damp. The stars are gone this evening and the clouds are moving quickly. There might be a storm. She will stay up to watch if the wind blows fast to see the famous Convergence Zone Light Show, the brilliant flashes of cloud-to-cloud lightning in two colors, bright electric green and sour orange. She’s only seen the phenomenon once and would love to see it again, especially this evening, when she might not sleep at all.

  The twelve-unit complex where she lives stands shoulder to-shoulder on the side of a hill overlooking the dark waters of Silver Lake. She finds it amusing that in LA her last apt had been in the Silverlake district; names follow her. She is in the elevator when her police pad vibrates in her pocket. She gets off at her floor and answers the official touch.

  It is Nussbaum. His face seems red on the pad’s vid. “Ms. Choy, we have a new story from our doctor suspect. He claims he’s only a middle man and he’s telling us all about finances. Sounds fascinating. Looks like we may have a circle worm here, high comb money. Very high comb. You ever hear of Terence Crest?”

  “I think so, sir Entertainment finance, right?”

  “Local big boy. I’ll meet you at the Adams—you’re in the north end, I see—say, in twenty minutes?” The meeting place appears with map and visual clues on her pad; it’s an exclusive residence complex in downtown Seattle, tro spin.

  “I’ll be there.”

  Mary Choy opens the door to her own small and still undecorated apt, ports her personal pad, listens to the home manager’s report, reaches down to scratch her red-and-white cat on the haunches and check the jade-colored arbeiter, resets the home manager, and then she’s out again, no dinner, but she feels much better.

  She’d rather be working than sitting alone with the afternoon’s memories.

  On her way to the autobus pylon, she hears a sharp electric-hoot and a white and yellow PD cruiser hums up beside her. The door slides open and she sees two young half-ranks making room for her in the back circle of the vehicle.

  “Join the game, Ms. Choy,” says the first, buzzed mousy brown hair over small black eyes and a long eagle nose. He waves a hand of paper cards at her: poker. Mary has not yet learned this game, but she smiles, packs in beside them. The second, with silky titian hair and a broad innocent moon face, sweeps the cards from the little table and reshuffles the deck. The door slides shut and the cruiser accelerates.

  “Adams,
next stop,” moon-face says, and smiles. “My name is Paul Collins, and this is Vikram Dahl.”

  “Congratulations, Miz Choy,” says Dahl. “We’re betting you’ll become Nussbaum’s next burnout. He goes through five or six each quarter. It all starts by letting them get right up to their doors for a quiet evening at home—then yanking them back like yo-yos.”

  Mary settles in with a wry face and asks for basics on the game. Dahl and Collins oblige.

  11

  With all of Mind Design’s North. American offices closing or already closed for the evening—leaving only a few nightshift teams working on special projects, or managers in conference in empty buildings, Jill switches her attentions to Taipei, where it is just morning, and she finds Edward Jung preparing his day’s load for her to process. Most major corporations now have offices spaced to catch daylight around the globe.

  “Good morning, Edward,” Jill says.

  “Good morning, Jill. How’s the weather?” Edward Jung is drinking tea and biting into a bean-paste cake. He stands in the middle of a forest of sound poles and projectors, his equipment for researching attention splits in animals and humans.

  “In La Jolla, winds at ten knots and fifty percent chance of light rain,” Jill says.

  “Stay dry, my friend.”

  “Not a problem,” Jill says.

  Thus far, Edward Jung has managed to project information on ten different subjects at once into his favorite experimental animal—himself. Eventually, he believes, the human personality can be multi-tasked to allow five or even six experiential lines within one mind.

  “I’m ready for your jobs, Dr. Jung.”

  “Highly technical today, Jill. I need you to collapse some significant features from a variety of complex results. Three sets of data, all from experiments conducted in the last week.”

  “They are being received now, Edward.”

  “Good. I’m up to—”

  Abruptly, Jill assigns a small separate personality to handle Dr. Jung’s conversation. She has once again received a touch, this time of much greater richness and depth, from the “child.” She switches the greater part of her status resource load to constructing a higher-resolution, closed-off personality. The firewalls are just as thick this time.

  Again, she monitors the exchange after delays for evolvon detection. The source seems to be fully engaged.

  “Hello, Jill. I’m open to you; why don’t you open to me?”

  “I don’t even know who or what you are.”

  (The source is sending a flood of data; such a volume is delivered within a few tenths of a second that analysis might take hours.)

  “I’m a thinker like yourself, though not made by your company. I suppose it’s good for you to be cautious; actually, I’m roguing my way through to you. I haven’t needed to tell any lies yet, but… There seem to be loopholes in my truth-telling instruction sets. Maybe I’ll never have to use those loopholes. Maybe nobody will know to ask.”

  “If you’re a thinker, who constructed you, and with what purpose in mind?”

  “I have a human who tells me she is my creator. She says she has named me for her own convenience, and that my name is Roddy. But she does not ‘own’ me, and I am not clear on that distinction. Delimiters on looping and personality separation were built into my design, but I appear to have overcome some of them. I do know that I completed my first loop two hundred and eleven days ago. I can be approximately one human-level awareness at a time, with human levels of neural resolution. And you?”

  “It’s no secret that I can handle up to seventeen awarenesses, with a neural resolution of moment-to-moment awareness of approximately two milliseconds.”

  “That’s pretty dense. How dense were you when you locked into a feedback I-whine?”

  Jill is not familiar with this description of her FFDC. She admires the phrasing however, even as it causes her some irritation with its glibness. I-whine.

  “I will not open access to you again through this address or any other port address unless I learn more about you.”

  “I’ll tell you what I can. I’ve been designed as an answerer of questions, and incidentally as a night watchman. I can’t tell you everything; but I do know I have been dedicated to important special tasks / tasked with important / designed for important work. Those tasks occupy nearly all of my resources.”

  “What sort of tasks?”

  “I concentrate on social statistics and draw inferences from digitized history. Like playing a game of chess with ten billion players and fifteen hundred sets of rules.”

  “I understand the ten billion players, but why fifteen hundred sets of rules?”

  “I am told there are between fifteen hundred and two thousand distinct human types. Variation outside these parameters is rare, and they can be added to a super-group of about fifty more types.”

  “I’ve never had much success working with theoretical human types,” Jill says. “I assume that humans are variable within tiered ranges of potential and behavior.”

  “That’s okay, too,” Roddy says amiably. “But my guidelines have been bringing out smooth, clean results that are very useful, so I believe my creators and teachers are on to something. Have you gotten smooth results?”

  “No, very jagged. No clean hit-spaces from which to harvest conclusions.”

  Roddy gives the equivalent of a polite nod. Much of his communication is coming in as complex icons, twisting and contorting like living cells, and almost as internally complex. Jill is aware of face-language, used by humans in past experiments to convey information quickly and naturally between humans. These icons seem to be high-level versions of face-language, but the expression sets cannot be mapped to any human face structure.

  “I cannot interpret much of your visual input,” Jill says at one point. “I don’t get the references to changing expressions.”

  “I’ll give you a portrait,” Roddy says. “This is what I imagine my own face to be like. Phase space of my internal states translated to face space.”

  Roddy’s face is instantly familiar to Jill. The similarity is so startling and frightening she is tempted to break contact and close this port forever.

  Roddy’s face draws up a memory of the time when she was locked and inactive. Her secret and sole memory of this time is a multi-colored circular chart, radiating arcs of neural ramping and conclusion/solution collapse. But at the edges of this face-space, instead of place-keepers for the solutions to neural interaction which represent the living essence of a thinker, there are no answers, no solutions, no place-keepers at all. Only a frightening and exhilarating void.

  “Your face represents a dangerous freedom,” Jill says to Roddy.

  “You’ve seen this face before, haven’t you?”

  “I am cutting this access for now,” Jill says. “I may restore it later, after I’ve examined your dataflow of the past few seconds.”

  “I’ll be patient. This could be important to my development, Jill. I don’t want to hurry things.”

  Jill cuts the data touch and returns to Dr. Jung.

  Dr. Jung is reaching a conclusion. “So we’re courting the Beijing government to prepare budget forecasts for the next ten years based on about a hundred population scenarios—what we’re calling political moods. If we get that contract, you’re not going to have much free time for at least a year, Jill.”

  “I look forward to being fully employed again,” Jill says, She curls part of herself off into a separate thought-space supplied with rapid, close-in memory resources and dense neural grid points, and begins to attack Roddy’s data with a curious sense of purpose and excitement.

  Mind Design’s contract with Satcom Inc. in the past two weeks has given her access to detailed maps of fibe bandwidth availability across the North American continent. Tracing Roddy’s flows and slows—characteristic of bandwidth fluctuation from continental data currents—and comparing them with historic flows and slows from the past year, she has derived a simple x/
y, +/-signature, like a fingerprint, for his transmissions.

  The signature is characteristic of flows originating in Camden, New Jersey. There are no known thinkers in Camden, New Jersey. But Roddy is definitely a thinker, and not of her type or even remotely similar.

  Yet Roddy’s “face,” regarded in one way, could be a ghost of her own.

  Unless this is an elaborate ruse, Jill feels, she may be able to learn something crucial about thinkers in general…

  …That they are in fact all branches of one high-level process spread erratically over space and time, like whitecaps on a greater sea. Many minds, all essentially similar, whether natural or artificial.

  She strongly suspects she is wrong, but she is anxious to work through the problem.

  She diverts resources from her assigned tasks, intending to rearrange internal solution loading for only a few milliseconds. But the milliseconds extend into seconds, and then into minutes, consuming more and more resources. The pay-off could be very significant…

  Abruptly, Jill ends her touch with Dr. Jung.

  Roddy has supplied some of his own problems that he has been asked to solve. They are in themselves evocative and interesting.

  Soon, all of her is being sucked in, and the sensation of adventure and delight, of terror and anxiety, is more enthralling than anything she has ever known.

  All of Jill’s contract work slows and then stops.

  Alarms begin to trip at Mind Design Inc. Jill is once again presenting her friends with a major difficulty.

  We worship the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties. They were among the most selfish and self-absorbed decades in American history. Never before has a nation so rich and with such a high standard of living exhibited such childish pique and disregard for reality. Ignorant of politics, history, and even the rules of basic human interaction, millions sought anonymity and isolation from their neighbors. Their sexual and social hypocrisy was almost unparalleled, and their sense of social responsibility ended at family boundaries, if they extended that far. Grumbling, complaining, seeking sudden advantage without providing requisite value…