Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  “Twenty-nine,” said Mother. “Twenty-eight. . . twenty-seven . . . twenty-six . . .”

  The window, thought Frankie. If he’d been a kilo of cocaine or a baby alligator he could have flushed his way out of here, but he wasn’t, so that left the window. He stepped to it, thumbed the latch, and pushed up on the sash.

  The window, painted shut years before, didn’t budge.

  “Twenty seconds,” said Mother, and Frankie heard a tentative scratching on the outside of the bathroom door. Scratching, and something else . . . music of some kind, a classical score that didn’t quite blend with the sirens and alarms of the movie soundtrack. Frankie didn’t waste time trying to place the tune; he yanked the shower curtain rod loose and used it to bash out the window glass.

  “You can’t get in here,” Frankie said, and Meisterbrau butted the steel door hard enough to buckle both hinges. Frankie went nuts, punching out the center sash of the window with his fist. He threw down the curtain rod and scrambled up onto the sill, crouching there in a tight ball, framed by splintered wood and glass.

  The jump didn’t look promising. It wasn’t that far to fall—twelve, maybe fourteen feet—but an iron fence ran close along this side of the villa, a fence capped with sharp spikes and razor wire. If Frankie was lucky enough to clear it without getting sliced up or impaled, he’d land hard in an alleyway strewn with the sort of contaminated refuse that bred three-headed squirrels.

  “Ten seconds,” said Mother. “Nine . . . eight . . .”

  “You’ve got to do it or you’re dinner,” Frankie told himself. Looking down into the alley for a clear landing spot, he noted the dark circle of a manhole cover, surrounded by a moonlit halo of bottle shards and scrap metal. The ghost of Jimmy Mireno taunted him: Scared, Lonzo? You fuckin’ scared?

  “Yes I am,” Frankie said, and gathered himself to leap.

  “Four. . . three. . . . “On two, Meisterbrau hit the bathroom door again; the hinges and deadbolt gave way, and the door fell in with a crash. On the brink of committing himself to the jump, Frankie pulled back, turned his head towards the sound. He saw Meisterbrau crouched in the doorway, heard Ravel’s Bolero issuing from between the shark’s blood-and-mucus-stained jaws, and knew himself for a dead man.

  “The option to override detonation procedure,” Mother concurred, “has now expired.”

  The shark reared back on its haunches—Holy God, Frankie Lonzo thought, this fucker has legs—and its pectoral fins snapped taut like the wings of a glider. Its mouth gaped wide, forming a scoop.

  “Mother?” Sigourney Weaver said, her voice plaintive. “I’ve turned the cooling unit back on . . . MOTHER’!!”

  “Mother,” Frankie agreed, and learned, in his last moment on earth, just how alternatively adapted Meisterbrau had become, as the Carcharodon carcharias proved that it could not only swim and crawl, but soar.

  17

  Plato (427–347 B.C.) saw degrees of truth everywhere and recoiled from them. For instance, he realized, no chair is perfect. It is only a chair to a certain degree. The whole physical world comes in similar grades of imperfection—shops, bridges, clouds, smiles, paintings, clever, gentle, fascinating, big, wide, long, everything.

  If an item is partly a chair, he reasoned, it is partly not a chair. . . . But that’s a contradiction. Could a contradiction exist? He dismissed the notion out of hand and thus faced a dilemma. Contradiction surrounded him like the sea surrounds a fish, yet it was impossible. He resolved the problem by declaring the physical world an illusion. The floor, the lawn, the sky, the book in your hands—all are a vast mirage.

  But then what was real? To answer this question, he brought forth the Ideals. Instead of this jewelry shop or that vegetable shop, he said, there was an Ideal Shop, and likewise an Ideal Bridge, an Ideal Cloud, an Ideal Chair. . . . All these Ideals existed in our minds from birth, and we accessed them by thought alone. Experience was delusion, but the Ideals were eternal and changeless, the only sure knowledge available.

  The theory of Ideals begs so many questions that, for most modern philosophers, it is now at best a shorthand reference for other notions. We need not mesh ourselves further in it, except to note two points. First, Plato confused partial contradictions with total ones, viewing the harmony between partly tall and partly short as conflict between tall and short. This error drove him to invent the Ideals. Second, he expelled fuzziness from existence, and in so doing he vaporized the world.

  —Daniel McNeill and Paul Freiberger, Fuzzy Logic

  Sheer Force of Will

  Lexa Thatcher and Ellen Leeuwenhoek were at the Fonda Blimp Drome outside of Newark by eleven the next morning. CNN had numerous such dromes sited strategically across six continents, but Newark’s was the largest, larger even than the flagship drome in Atlanta. As Ellen steered her Citroen into the PRESS ONLY parking lot, they could see a Pulitzer-class blimp just lifting off from the field, bound for a chemical plant fire in Trenton. Pulitzers were the workhorses of the CNN fleet, three-person craft crewing a pilot, camera operator, and reporter-narrator. There were also the smaller Gonzos, single-seat, “kamikaze” blimps with the speed and maneuverability of jet helicopters, and the larger Murrows, which had extra room in the gondola for a news analyst and two political commentators. But none of these would suit Lexa’s purposes today. She needed the most durable airship available, with a gas bag big enough to lift a ton or more of dead weight; she needed a Hearst.

  “Jane’s here,” said Ellen, indicating an enormous silhouette in the middle distance. “And inflated to boot. Now all we need is permission to borrow her.”

  “We’ll get permission,” Lexa said. “I have my Letter of Marque from Ted Turner.”

  “You have your Letter of Marque from the late Ted Turner. Now that he’s gone on to that last great plane-change in Atlanta, his name may not carry the same clout around here; the ground crew might say no.”

  “They won’t say no,” Lexa insisted. “Not to me.”

  “I brought something,” Ellen told her. She leaned across from the driver’s seat and extracted a handgun from the Citroen’s glove compartment. She gave it to Lexa.

  Lexa stared at the porcelain-gray automatic pistol as if it were the first firearm she’d ever seen. “What is this?”

  “.44 Magnum, I think,” Ellen said. “It’s cast from a non-metallic polymer, so we can walk it right through drome security.”

  “And do what with it?”

  Ellen shrugged, looking embarrassed. “The ground crew might say no,” she repeated.

  Continuing to hold the pistol as if it were an alien artifact, Lexa asked: “Is it loaded?”

  “Don’t be silly. We’re pacifists, right? If we actually have to fire a gun it means we aren’t using it properly.”

  “Where did you get this, anyway?”

  “D.C. One of the Republican campaign flacks has a sideline collecting and trading famous murder weapons. Charles Whitman’s rifle, Jim Jones’s poison ring collection, that sort of thing. It’s kind of sick.”

  “Who was murdered with this?”

  “Nobody. That’s just a target pistol. He said he uses it to hunt bats on his ranch in Texas. He left it in the car, so I kept it.”

  “Well,” said Lexa, patting Ellen’s hand, “thanks for the thought, Kinky, but no thanks. Not my style.”

  “How do we handle it, then?” Ellen asked. “If they don’t want to give us the blimp?”

  “Same way we always handle it when we need something,” Lexa said. “Sheer force of will.” She started to put the gun back in the glove compartment, then paused, suddenly thoughtful. “You know, though . . .”

  “What?”

  “There is a way we could use this, without threatening anyone.”

  “Tell me.”

  Lexa slipped the pistol into her purse. “Just cross your fingers that the right people are in the main hangar this morning.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Lower my ethical standa
rds to those of an Australian tabloid.”

  “Bullshit up a storm, in other words.”

  “Right.” Lexa kissed Ellen on the cheek. “Do you trust me?”

  “Always.”

  “Good. Let’s go get ourselves a blimp.”

  G.A.S.

  “So,” said Joan.

  “So,” said Kite.

  “Now we know.”

  Now they knew. If they looked shell-shocked staring at each other across the kitchenette table, that was partly a result of lack of sleep, partly a result of the carton of Marlboros they’d chain-smoked while not sleeping, but mostly a result of what they’d learned—or thought they’d learned, since the story revealed in Hoover’s secret case file did stretch credulity in one or two spots. Still, Joan had managed to rustle up another computer with a modem—nothing as fancy as her Cray, but serviceable—to dial up some databases and verify a few facts. What could be checked out did check out, and the final picture involved a lot more than just the death of Amberson Teaneck.

  “’Learn to relax and wait for the epiphany,’” Joan quoted. “Was this what you had in mind, Kite?”

  Kite shook her head. “I ran afoul of Boss Tweed’s boys once,” she said, “the first time I visited New York after the war. But this beats by a mile any conspiracy Tammany Hall ever concocted.”

  Though the air in the kitchenette was an almost solid haze of nicotine, Joan groped among crumpled cigarette packs for one more unsmoked butt. She found it and lit it. “OK,” she said, “let’s run over the whole thing one more time . . .”

  “All right.”

  “First,” Joan said, “Walt Disney didn’t hire John Hoover as a roboticist. Hoover did do some minor audio-animatronics design, but that was a cover for his real work on a secret project that he’d successfully pitched to Disney in the 1950s. An artificial intelligence project.”

  “An Electric Brain,” Kite said. She consulted a sheaf of scribbled notes. “A ‘Gas-phase Analogue Supercomputer.’”

  “‘G.A.S.,’” Joan said, consulting the same notes, “which uses ‘a complex mix of gases in a plasma state’ to emulate the neural processes of a living creature. A plasma computer: ionized gas instead of silicon.”

  “And the plasma chamber,” said Kite, “this machine’s brain, requires a lot of power and generates a lot of heat.”

  “Hence Walt Disney’s supposed fascination with cryogenics. He had no intention of freezing himself; he just needed to keep his AI from burning itself up while it was thinking.”

  “They installed it in a bunker complex hidden underneath the Magic Kingdom in Orange County,” Kite continued. “It took eleven years to engineer and build . . .”

  “. . . which is still a miraculous achievement,” said Joan, “given the state of computer science in the Fifties and Sixties. But John Hoover was a bona fide genius, and G.A.S. was a revolutionary concept.”

  “It cost millions . . .”

  “. . . all of it from Disney’s personal fortune. Walt’s brother Roy handled finances for the Disney organization, and Roy was a conservative who for the most part didn’t share Walt’s visionary outlook: he opposed the construction of Disneyland, Disney World, and Epcot Center. He didn’t see why they should go into the theme park business when they already had a proven track record making films.”

  “It goes without saying,” said Kite, “that he would have been dead set against pouring a fortune into an experiment in creative computing. It’s doubtful many banks would have been enthusiastic about the project, either.”

  “So Walt secretly mortgaged a big chunk of his own portfolio to finance G.A.S. We know from memos he exchanged with Hoover that he wanted to present the artificial intelligence to his brother and the world as a fait accompli. That way, once the system had been perfected, he’d have no trouble getting the backing to build an even more elaborate plasma computer for the City of Tomorrow he was going to erect in Florida. A Disney Utopia, with a benevolent AI acting as godfather to the community.”

  “But it didn’t work out that way in reality.”

  “No,” Joan agreed. “It took too long. By the time G.A.S. was ready for its first power-up, in the winter of 1966, Disney had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. On December 5th, Walt’s sixty-fifth birthday, John Hoover sent a telegram to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank to let Walt know that ‘godfather’ was finally up and running. But Walt wasn’t. He died ten days later.”

  “Without telling anyone else about the project,” Kite added. “Not even his wife.”

  “Which made John Hoover the sole custodian of the most powerful computer—and, so far as we know, the only truly self-aware artificial intelligence—in the world.”

  “And Hoover was a sociopath.”

  “A little character flaw that Disney never quite caught on to. The Times obituary was wrong about Hoover having worked as a cryptographer for the Army Signal Corps; it’s true he applied to be a codebreaker, and he passed the technical exams without a hitch, but he washed out on the MMPI standardized psychological health test.”

  “The army concluded from the test results,” Kite said, “that Hoover, though brilliant, was a psychopathic deviate with no sense of empathy towards other human beings and hence no ability to form lasting loyalties.”

  “Not the kind of person you give a security clearance to. The army passed on Hoover’s application. But Walt Disney didn’t use fancy tests to decide whether he should hire a man. He saw right off that Hoover had the sort of talent he was looking for, and either didn’t notice or didn’t care what a demented talent Hoover was.”

  “Now just to make sure I understand this correctly,” Kite said, “G.A.S. couldn’t actually do very much, physically, I mean . . .”

  “Not at first. In ’66 there weren’t the vast telephone computer networks that there are now, so G.A.S. couldn’t access government files, or break into TRW and alter credit histories, or seize control of remote-operated machinery. . . . According to Hoover’s private journal, the AI’s peripheral devices were extremely limited to begin with. Two input terminals, one in the bunker, one in Hoover’s Anaheim apartment, and two sets of hidden cameras and microphone pick-ups, one in Disney’s private screening room, one in the dining hall that became Club 33.”

  “So it could watch movies, watch people eat, and talk to John Hoover.”

  “And it could think. Which as our friend on the microwave will tell you”—Joan nodded at Ayn’s Lamp—“is enough to move the world. Hoover believed G.A.S. was the smartest thing on the planet, and even if that’s a fatherly exaggeration, it was definitely smarter than he was. And he put that brainpower to work.”

  “He had to,” said Kite. “He’d lost his patron.”

  “Right. Roy Disney took charge of the organization after his brother’s death, and immediately started making changes, paring down Walt’s more ambitious schemes. The City of Tomorrow concept went out the window, for starters; Epcot Center would never be more than a shadow of what Walt had originally envisioned. Each new downsizing of operations brought a wave of transfers, lay-offs, and firings, and John Hoover was just a mid-level tech with no special claim to job security. The fact that he’d been close to Walt actually counted against him in some circles of the new Disney hierarchy.”

  “So he had to make himself indispensable in a hurry . . .”

  “. . . and he did, with G.A.S.’s help, by brainstorming a flurry of money-saving technological innovations that shaved almost two million dollars off Walt Disney World’s construction cost.”

  “Which endeared him to Roy Disney in a way that nothing else could have,” said Kite, “and earned him a more tenured position in the organization. For a while, he was safe.”

  Joan paused to light a fresh cigarette. “In 1971,” she continued, “three important events took place. One, Walt Disney World opened to the public. Two, Roy Disney died . . .”

  “. . . and three, J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn had lunch at Club 33.”

&
nbsp; “Someone had given J. Edgar a guest membership in the club. Maybe he’d done some favor for a Disney executive, or maybe it was just a cautionary good-will gesture; whichever, he was in California on F.B.I. business and he decided to invite his good friend Roy Cohn to Disneyland to check out the wine selection. John Hoover, meanwhile, was away in Florida doing hands-on work at Walt Disney World, which left G.A.S. home alone and bored. To keep from going stir-crazy, the computer turned on its video and audio pick-ups and eavesdropped on the patrons at Club 33. Unfortunately, the hidden microphone system in the dining room was so badly degraded that G.A.S. could barely hear anything, and it ended up mistaking Hoover and Cohn’s dinner order for a root-level reprogramming command.”

  “I have to wonder,” said Kite, “how much of a ’mistake’ that really was. It strikes me as odd that such a smart machine could make such a stupid error. Think about it, Joan, it must have heard people order food before.”

  “So you think it deliberately misunderstood what was said?”

  “I think it had a choice of interpretations and chose the more interesting one. As you’ve said, it was probably pretty bored.”

  “Hmm,” Joan said. “Well, either way, the outcome was the same. From that day on, G.A.S. had a new mission in life.”

  “Creating a world full of perfect Negroes.”

  “Of course, given the sheltered nature of its existence, G.A.S. didn’t know much about the world, other than what Hoover chose to tell it. And unless Julian Bond dropped by Club 33 at some point, the only blacks it had any direct experience with were classic film characters.”

  “Uncle Remus from Song of the South.”

  “Farina and Buckwheat from the Our Gang comedies.”

  “Stepin Fetchit. The crows from Dumbo.”

  “All perfect Negroes. G.A.S. studied them religiously, but without a wider window on the real world it couldn’t decide how to act on the first part of its new directive.”