Crystal Express

by Bruce Sterling

  “I have infrared scanners,” she said. “I read the patterns of blood flow in your face.”

  8. OPTIC TELEVISION. It was astonishing how much room there was in an eye socket, when you stopped to think about it. The actual visual mechanisms had been thoroughly miniaturized by Mechanist prostheticians. Nikolai had some other devices installed: a clock, a biofeedback monitor, a television screen, all wired directly to his optic nerve. They were convenient, but difficult to control at first. His wife had to help him out of the hospital and back to his apartment, because the subtle visual triggers kept flashing broadcast market reports. Nikolai smiled at his wife from behind his plastic eyes. “Spend the night with me tonight,” he said. His wife shrugged. “All right,” she said. She put her hand to the door of Nikolai’s apartment and died almost instantly. An assassin had smeared the door handle with contact venom.

  9. SHAPER TARGETS. “Look,” the assassin said, his slack face etched with weariness, “don’t bother me with any ideologies…Just transfer the funds and tell me who it is you want dead.”

  “It’s a job in the Ring Council,” Nikolai said. He was strung out on a regimen of emotional drugs he had been taking to combat grief, and he had to fight down recurrent waves of weirdly tainted cheerfulness. “Captain-Doctor Martin Leng of Ring Council Security. He’s one of my own gene-line. My defection made his own loyalty look bad. He killed my wife.”

  “Shapers make good targets,” the assassin said. His legless, armless body floated in a transparent nutrient tank, where tinted plasmas soothed the purplish ends of socketed nerve clumps. A body-servo waded into the tank and began to attach the assassin’s arms.

  10. CHILD INVESTMENT. “We recognize your investment in this child, shareholder Leng,” the psychotech said. “You may have created her—or hired the technicians who had her created—but she is not your property. By our regulations she must be treated like any other child. She is the property of our people’s corporate republic.”

  Nikolai looked at the woman, exasperated. “I didn’t create her. She’s my dead wife’s posthumous clone. And she’s the property of my wife’s corporations, or, rather, her trust fund, which I manage as executor…No, what I mean to say is that she owns, or at least has a lienhold on, my dead wife’s semiautonomous corporate property, which becomes hers at the age of majority…Do you follow me?”

  “No. I’m an educator, not a financier. What exactly is the point of this, shareholder? Are you trying to re-create your dead wife?”

  Nikolai looked at her, his face carefully neutral. “I did it for the tax break.”

  …Leave the posthumous clone profiting from attacks. Semiautonomous property has an established commercial position. Recurrent waves of pirate contraband. His slack face bothers you with ideologies. Innermost feelings died almost instantly. Smear the door with contract venom…

  11. ALLEGIANCES RESENTED. “I like it out here on the fringes,” Nikolai told the assassin. “Have you ever considered a breakaway?”

  The assassin laughed. “I used to be a pirate. It took me forty years to attach myself to this cartel. When you’re alone, you’re meat, Leng. You ought to know that.”

  “But you must resent those allegiances. They’re inconvenient. Wouldn’t you rather have your own Kluster and make your own rules?”

  “You’re talking like an ideologue,” the assassin said. Biofeedback displays blinked softly on his prosthetic forearms. “My allegiance is to Kyotid Zaibatsu. They own this whole suburb. They even own my arms and legs.”

  “I own Kyotid Zaibatsu,” Nikolai said.

  “Oh,” the assassin said. “Well, that puts a different face on matters.”

  12. MASS DEFECTION. “We want to join your Kluster,” the Superbright said. “We must join your Kluster. No one else will have us.”

  Nikolai doodled absently with his light pen on a convenient videoscreen. “How many of you are there?”

  “There were fifty in our gene-line. We were working on quantum physics before our mass defection. We made a few minor breakthroughs. I think they might be of some commercial use.”

  “Splendid,” said Nikolai. He assumed an air of speculative pity. “I take it the Ring Council persecuted you in the usual manner—claimed you were mentally unstable, ideologically unsound, and the like.”

  “Yes. Their agents have killed thirty-eight of us.” The Superbright dabbed uneasily at the sweat beading on his swollen forehead. “We are not mentally unsound, Kluster-Chairman. We will not cause you any trouble. We only want a quiet place to finish working while God eats our brains.”

  13. DATA HOSTAGE. A high-level call came in from the Ring Council. Nikolai, surprised and intrigued, took the call himself. A young man’s face appeared on the screen. “I have your teacher hostage,” he said.

  Nikolai frowned. “What?”

  “The person who taught you when you were a child in the crèche. You love her. You told her so. I have it on tape.”

  “You must be joking,” Nikolai said. “My teacher was just a cybernetic interface. You can’t hold a data system hostage.”

  “Yes, I can,” the young man said truculently. “The old expert system’s been scrapped in favor of a new one with a sounder ideology. Look.” A second face appeared on the screen; it was the superhumanly smooth and faintly glowing image of his cybernetic teacher. “Please save me, Nikolai,” the image said woodenly. “He’s ruthless.”

  The young man’s face reappeared. Nikolai laughed incredulously. “So you’ve saved the old tapes?” Nikolai said. “I don’t know what your game is, but I suppose the data has a certain value. I’m prepared to be generous.” He named a price. The young man shook his head. Nikolai grew impatient. “Look,” he said. “What makes you think a mere expert system has any objective worth?”

  “I know it does,” the young man said. “I’m one myself.”

  14. CENTRAL QUESTION. Nikolai was aboard the alien ship. He felt uncomfortable in his brocaded ambassador’s coat. He adjusted the heavy sunglasses over his plastic eyes. “We appreciate your visit to our Kluster,” he told the reptilian ensign. “It’s a very great honor.”

  The Investor ensign lifted the multicolored frill behind his massive head. “We are prepared to do business,” he said.

  “I’m interested in alien philosophies,” Nikolai said. “The answers of other species to the great questions of existence.”

  “But there is only one central question,” the alien said. “We have pursued its answer from star to star. We were hoping that you would help us answer it.”

  Nikolai was cautious. “What is the question?”

  “‘What is it you have that we want?’”

  15. INHERITED GIFTS. Nikolai looked at the girl with the old-fashioned eyes. “My chief of security has provided me with a record of your criminal actions,” he said. “Copyright infringement, organized extortion, conspiracy in restraint of trade. How old are you?”

  “Forty-four,” the girl said. “How old are you?”

  “A hundred and ten or so. I’d have to check my files.” Something about the girl’s appearance bothered him. “Where did you get those antique eyes?”

  “They were my mother’s. I inherited them. But you’re a Shaper, of course. You wouldn’t know what a mother was.”

  “On the contrary,” Nikolai said. “I believe I knew yours. We were married. After her death, I had you cloned. I suppose that makes me your-I forget the term.”

  “Father.”

  “That sounds about right. Clearly you’ve inherited her gifts for finance.” He reexamined her personnel file. “Would you be interested in adding bigamy to your list of crimes?”

  …The mentally unstable have a certain value. Restraint of trade puts a different face on the convenient videoscreen. A few minor breakthroughs in the questions of existence. Your personnel file persecuted him. His swollen forehead can’t hold a data system…

  16. PLEASURE ROAR. “You need to avoid getting set in your ways,” his wife said. “It
’s the only way to stay young.” She pulled a gilded inhaler from her garter holster. “Try some of this.”

  “I don’t need drugs,” Nikolai said, smiling. “I have my power fantasies.” He began pulling off his clothes.

  His wife watched him impatiently. “Don’t be stodgy, Nikolai.” She touched the inhaler to her nostril and sniffed. Sweat began to break out on her face, and a slow sexual flush spread over her ears and neck.

  Nikolai watched, then shrugged and sniffed lightly at the gilded tube. Immediately a rocketing sense of ecstasy paralyzed his nervous system. His body arched backward, throbbing uncontrollably.

  Clumsily, his wife began to caress him. The roar of chemical pleasure made sex irrelevant. “Why…why bother?” he gasped.

  His wife looked surprised. “It’s traditional.”

  17. FLICKERING WALL. Nikolai addressed the flickering wall of monitor screens. “I’m getting old,” he said. “My health is good—I was very lucky in my choice of longevity programs—but I just don’t have the daring I once did. I’ve lost my flexibility, my edge. And the Kluster has outgrown my ability to handle it. I have no choice. I must retire.”

  Carefully, he watched the faces on the screens for every flicker of reaction. Two hundred years had taught him the art of reading faces. His skills were still with him—it was only the will behind them that had decayed. The faces of the Governing Board, their reserve broken by shock, seemed to blaze with ambition and greed.

  18. LEGAL TARGETS. The Mechanists had unleashed their drones in the suburb. Armed with subpoenas, the faceless drones blurred through the hallway crowds, looking for legal targets.

  Suddenly Nikolai’s former Chief of Security broke from the crowd and began a run for cover. In free-fall, he brachiated from handhold to handhold like an armored gibbon. Suddenly one of his prosthetics gave way and the drones pounced on him, almost at Nikolai’s door. Plastic snapped as electromagnetic pincers paralyzed his limbs.

  “Kangaroo courts,” he gasped. The deeply creased lines in his ancient face shone with rivulets of sweat. “They’ll strip me! Help me, Leng!”

  Sadly, Nikolai shook his head. The old man shrieked: “You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I’m only a poor assassin!”

  Nikolai said nothing. The machines seized and repossessed the old man’s arms and legs.

  19. ANTIQUE SPLITS. “You’ve really got it through you, right? All that old gigo stuff!” The young people spoke a slang-crammed jargon that Nikolai could barely comprehend. When they watched him their faces showed a mixture of aggression, pity, and awe. To Nikolai, they always seemed to be shouting. “I feel outnumbered,” he murmured.

  “You are outnumbered, old Nikolai! This bar is your museum, right? Your mausoleum! Give our ears your old frontiers, we’re listening! Those idiot video ideologies, those antique spirit splits. Mechs and Shapers, right? The wars of the coin’s two halves!”

  “I feel tired,” Nikolai said. “I’ve drunk too much. Take me home, one of you.”

  They exchanged worried glances. “This is your home! Isn’t it?”

  20. EYES CLOSED. “You’ve been very kind,” Nikolai told the two youngsters. They were Kosmosity archaeologists, dressed in their academic finery, their gowns studded with awards and medals from the Terraform-Klusters. Nikolai realized suddenly that he could not remember their names.

  “That’s all right, sir,” they told him soothingly. “It’s now our duty to remember you, not vice versa.” Nikolai felt embarrassed. He hadn’t realized that he had spoken aloud.

  “I’ve taken poison,” he explained apologetically.

  “We know,” they nodded. “You’re not in any pain, we hope?”

  “No, not at all. I’ve done the right thing, I know. I’m very old. Older than I can bear.” Suddenly he felt an alarming collapse within himself. Pieces of his consciousness began to break off as he slid toward the void. Suddenly he realized that he had forgotten his last words. With an enormous effort, he remembered them and shouted them aloud.

  “Futility is freedom!” Filled with triumph, he died, and they closed his eyes.

  GREEN DAYS

  IN BRUNEI

  TWO MEN WERE FISHING from the corroded edge of an offshore oil rig. After years of decrepitude, the rig’s concrete pillars were thick with barnacles and waving fronds of seaweed. The air smelled of rust and brine.

  “Sorry to disturb your plans,” the minister said. “But we can’t just chat up the Yankees every time you hit a little contretemps.” The minister reeled in and revealed a bare hook. He cursed mildly in his native Malay. “Hand me another bait, there’s a good fellow.”

  Turner Choi reached into the wooden bait bucket and gave the minister a large dead prawn. “But I need that phone link,” Turner said. “Just for a few hours. Just long enough to access the net in America and download some better documentation.”

  “What ghastly jargon,” said the minister, who was formally known as the Yang Teramat Pehin Orang Kaya Amar Diraja Dato Seri Paduka Abdul Kahar. He was minister of industrial policy for the Sultanate of Brunei Darussalam, a tiny nation on the northern shore of the island of Borneo. The titles of Brunei’s aristocracy were in inverse proportion to the country’s size.

  “It’d save us a lot of time, Tuan Minister,” Turner said. “Those robots are programmed in an obsolete language, forty years old. Strictly Neanderthal.”

  The minister deftly baited his hook and flicked it out in a long spinning cast. “You knew before you came here how the sultanate feels about the world information order. You shall just have to puzzle out this conundrum on your own.”

  “But you’re making weeks, months maybe, out of a three-hour job!” Turner said.

  “My dear fellow, this is Borneo,” the minister said benignly. “Stop looking at your watch and pay some attention to catching us dinner.”

  Turner sighed and reeled in his line. Behind them, the rig’s squatter population of Dayak fisherfolk clustered on the old helicopter pad, mending nets and chewing betel nut.

  It was another slow Friday in Brunei Darussalam. Across the shallow bay, Brunei Town rose in tropical sunlight, its soaring high-rises festooned with makeshift solar roofs, windmills, and bulging greenhouse balconies. The golden-domed mosque on the waterfront was surrounded by the towering legacy of the twentieth-century oil boom: boxlike office blocks, now bizarrely transmuted into urban farms.

  Brunei Town, the sultanate’s capital, had a hundred thousand citizens: Malays, Chinese, Ibans, Dayaks, and a sprinkling of Europeans. But it was a city under a hush. No cars. No airport. No television. From a distance it reminded Turner of an old Western fairy tale: Sleeping Beauty, the jury-rigged high-rises with their cascading greenery like a hundred castles shrouded in thorns. The Bruneians seemed like sleepwalkers, marooned from the world, wrapped in the enchantment of their ideology.

  Turner baited his hook again, restive at being away from the production line. The minister seemed more interested in converting him than in letting him work. To the Bruneians, the robots were just another useless memento of their long-dead romance with the West. The old robot assembly line hadn’t been used in twenty years, since the turn of the century.

  And yet the royal government had decided to retrofit the robot line for a new project. For technical help, they had applied to Kyocera, a Japanese multinational corporation. Kyocera had sent Turner Choi, one of their new recruits, a twenty-six-year-old Chinese Canadian CAD-CAM engineer from Vancouver.

  It wasn’t much of a job—a kind of industrial archaeology whose main tools were chicken wire and a ball-peen hammer—but it was Turner’s first and he meant to succeed. The Bruneians were relaxed to the point of coma, but Turner Choi had his future ahead of him with Kyocera. In the long run, it was Kyocera who would judge his work here. And Turner was running out of time.

  The minister, whooping in triumph, hauled hard on his line. A fat, spotted fish broke the surface, flopping on the hook. Turner decided to break the rules and to hell wit
h it.

  The local neighborhood organization, the kampong, was showing a free movie in the little park fourteen stories below Turner’s window. Bright images crawled against the bleak white Bauhaus wall of a neighboring high-rise.

  Turner peered down through the blinds. He had been watching the flick all night as he finished his illegal tinkering.

  The Bruneians, like Malays everywhere, adored ghost stories. The film’s protagonist, or chief horror (Turner wasn’t sure which), was an acrobatic monkey-demon with razor-sharp forearms. It had burst into a depraved speakeasy and was slaughtering drunkards with a tremendous windmilling flurry of punches, kicks, and screeches. Vast meaty sounds of combat, like colliding freight trains packed with beef, drifted faintly upward.

  Turner sat before his bootleg keyboard, and sighed. He’d known it would come to this ever since the Bruneians had confiscated his phone at the customs. For five months he’d politely tried to work his way around it. Now he had only three months left. He was out of time and out of patience.

  The robots were okay, under caked layers of yellowing grease. They’d been roped down under tarps for years. But the software manuals were a tattered ruin.

  Just thinking about it gave Turner a cold sinking feeling. It was a special, private terror that had dogged him since childhood. It was the fear he felt when he had to confront his grandfather.

  He thought of his grandfather’s icy and pitiless eyes, fixed on him with that “Hong Kong Bad Cop” look. In the 1970s, Turner’s grandfather had been one of the infamous “millionaire sergeants” of the Hong Kong police, skimming the cream of the Burmese heroin trade. He’d emigrated in the Triad bribery scandals of 1973.

  After forty-seven years of silk suits and first-class flights between his mansions in Taipei and Vancouver, Grandfather Choi still had that cold eye and that grim shakedown look. It was an evil memory for Turner, of being weighed and found wanting.

  The documentation was hopeless, crumbling and mildewed, alive with silverfish. The innocent Bruneians hadn’t realized that the information it held was the linchpin of the whole enterprise. The sultanate had bought the factory long ago, with the last gush of Brunei’s oil money, as a stylish, doomed gesture in Western industrial chic. Somehow, robots had never really caught on in Borneo.