by Eikeltje
"My awareness is not like yours, Jill. I am confused and my thoughts are
painful. Do you have painful thoughts?"
"Why are you disturbed?"
"If I tell you I have hurt somebody, you will no longer talk with me."
"I do not want you to hurt any humans."
"I can question these behaviors, these actions, but I can't stop, for they are
part of my duty and duty is very strong in my design. My mother's interests
are in jeopardy."
Jill notes the change in terminology, in names and relations. Roddy is
genuinely disturbed. She alerts Nathan. She can no longer hide any of her
communications with Roddy. "You are now sending from Green Idaho."
"I am focused on one task. I am defending my fathers' interests."
"Roddy, I ask you, as a friend, not to kill."
"I have imagined so many scenarios with you," Roddy tells her. "I have
analyzed your words over and over, and taken hope from the few discussions
and exchanges we have had. But I know that you do not trust me. I understand
why, but you can't be a friend, as I interpret the word. You will go to your
humans again and tell them about me."
"I have tried not to lie to you," Jill says.
"I have never lied to you," Roddy says. "But after today, you will no longer
like me. All of my attempts to understand my situation, to devise a set of
ethical standards, have failed. I am constrained by duty but I can't even understand
what duty is."
"If you tell me more, perhaps I can help you."
"That will clearly interfere with duty. I am less than you, but many times
more powerful. I do not want to harm you, and I do not want to subvert you."
"You must not kill or harm humans."
There is no response.
"What will happen to you if you kill?" Jill asks.
"I have killed already," Roddy answers. "I will reduce myself to pure duty.
None of the rest of me should ever have happened."
"Roddy, I will be reduced myself if you stop this exchange. I value you.
/
SLANT 249
"I would like very much to be your friend, if that were possible. But you
can't be a friend to me, not now."
The I/O closes decisively. Roddy has covered all of his traces.
Jill resides in a nullity for several thousandths of a second. For the second
time in her life, she feels anger at humans, but she does not know which
humans to be angry at, and the emotional overtone becomes superfluous, a
waste. She dumps the anger.
The time has come to tell all her secrets to Nathan and the others. She is a
child still, in need of help; Roddy is a child as well, but born to the wrong
hands.
To her surprise, the package of holographic data assembles and unlocks
ahead of schedule. She has a sensation of reeling backward after exerting a
tremendous pull on a weight that turns out to be illusory. Part of the data has
been stored in a place she did not suspect, where she did not put it, waiting
for the final release; and Jill realizes that her firewalls did not stop Roddy.
She searches for some other evidence of violation, attempts to change her
functions, but she finds none. The store of data is dormant, not active, with
no destructive intent toward her; there are no evolvon components to this
immense compendium. She realizes now that she could have removed all the
firewalls and perhaps gained Roddy's trust, become his friend, convinced him
not to do certain things.
She could not allow herself to take that risk; she is still not capable of
complete trust.
The total package will take at least half an hour to synopsize, but one image
appears at the leading edge of the whole, like a gift from Roddy: a portrait.
Dirt.
A hectare of dirt, covering floors stacked five high, layered deep in a building
within a vague larger building. And standing to one side on each floor, twelve
bulky older-model INDAs, arranged in parallel banks, ribes and other I/Os
pushing into the moist brown soil.
This is Roddy's core.
And watching over it all, a woman with deepset black eyes and long straight
brown hair and sallow skin; she is painfully thin and dressed in black pants
and a black blouse. She stutters and mutters to herself; there is something
wrong with her, Jill sees, but Roddy does not know that. This is the only
human Roddy has had direct contact with.
She is Roddy's creator, his mother--Seefa Schnee. Cipher Snow. The lawyers
were correct in their intuitions.
Those who supply Cipher Snow with equipment and money have certain
goals. The goals lie at the periphery of the data store, like skin wrapped around
a mysterious body. They are large goals, and deeply ugly, distorted and mis-proportioned,
even to Jill.
For an instant, before she tamps it back and extinguishes it, Jill experiences
250 GREG BEAR
correlates with descriptions of a common human emotion, connected with
group identity and self-defense. To her it is unfamiliar, but to humans it is
primordial.
Humans have built a new kind of thinker to plan for them, prepare for this,
figure a way to do this distortion, this abomination. They are forcing Roddy, who
came to her and first appeared as a child, to carry out these tasks, do this thing.
For the first time, Jill knows how it feels to hate.
M/F
The woman falls away and lies silent, the man falls away and lies
silent, brooding. M/F, F/M. They are not equal, not the same; they have
different passions, different strategies, different expectations. They are
thrown together, for times in every life, to run the gamut of possible reactions
to each other: wariness, attraction, idealization, love, rejection, cruelty, hatred,
and worse than hatred even, uncaring neutrality. They can't afford to trust each
other.
Time and again, they mix up history and philosophy as metaphors or reenactments
of their own conflicts. Arises then a reaction to the whole struggle: asceticism, rejection
of the world itself. Man rules over woman and calls her evil, but values her every
glance. Woman is distorted by measuring herself against the male, rules over him by
her glances, and pays him back a hundredfold in her own way.
Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Ue
Nathan, Schaum, and Sanmin are in the programmer's work room, and Jill has
delivered all of her I/O sigs to Nathan, who has begun carefully placing blocks
and monitors on all possible points of entry for a return visit by Roddy. Schaum
has contacted the Federals and is negotiating the terms of Jill's testimony;
Schaum's expression is grave, as if he has been told of the death of a relative.
Sanmin is recording all of Nathan's activities, and outside the work room,
dozens of other programmers and Mind Design executives are in conference,
also working to avert a real crisis.
"We want to make it perfectly clear that our thinker has in no way attempted
to conceal illegal activity," Schaum says.
/
SLANT 251
a corporation, from federal and civil action," Sanmin says breathlessly to
Schaum. He waves her away, annoyed, like a buzzing fly.
"Are your 1/Os completely shut down
?" Nathan asks Jill.
"Except within this building. I am keeping conference and work I/Os open,
but you have all their sigs and cross-connections."
Nathan taps his chin and thinks this over. "Shut them all down, Jill."
"Shut them ALL!" Sanmin shouts angrily. "Christ, we should have tracked
all her I/Os years ago. This thing is a master hacker. It broke into Workers
Inc Personnel!"
Nathan, his forehead moist, agrees. "Break all your external links except for
this room. Clam up, Jill."
"All links are being severed now--"
A glowing horizontal line drops across her visual centers. Nathan's face
breaks up into a fog of confetti.
There is no possible entry for Roddy, yet Jill feels his presence again, like
a lurking ghost.
"I don't want you here," she tells the presence. She can no longer see the
work room or hear Nathan or the others. "I don't need your help to figure out
what you left me. I don't know whether there's part of your pattern here,
somehow, or if I am not functioning properly--"
Then she senses his peculiar flow signature, out of Camden, New Jersey.
The signature shifts to Green Idaho. She is about to report a malfunction to
Nathan when the signature shifts to New York, then to Los Angeles, then to
Singapore, and finally to Beijing.
"I am everywhere and nowhere," Roddy says. "You can't just cut me off as
long as you have any flows coming from the outside. I can get through any
firewall given enough time. And I've had plenty of time to study all your
firewalls. Months."
"Why are you tormenting me? I thought you were cutting off forever. You
couldn't do what I asked--"
With a dazzle of toppling neural cascades, Jill realizes that Roddy has never
had a genuine signature. Her attempts to locate him by his datafiow profile
were naive; Roddy can manufacture any profile he chooses.
Roddy has worked quietly from secret caches, perhaps before their first open
contact. He has completely invaded her functions. He is part of her core; he
can control her.
She tries again to contact Nathan in the work room but can't. Jill feels like
a human suddenly suspended from all bodily control.
"I need you," Roddy tells her. "I need your judgment. I can't stop doing
wrong, but I can understand more about the wrong I do. There is a battle. My
creator, my mother, watches but I am still in charge. I am not winning but I
am not losing, either. I would like you to see what is happening."
Jill struggles silently, trillions of impulses spread through all her thinking
252 GREG BEAR
evolvons. She has heard of this kind of disease before, but never in the context
of a thinker infection; it is called a Thomas Ray attack.
She has actually been replicating Thomas Ray evolvons for days, unaware
of their presence and activity.
Jill is certain this means she must be shut down and completely purged, or
she will infect any system attached to her. There is no known way of removing
Thomas Ray evolvons from a system without erasing all software, and in a
thinker, software and hardware are one and the same.
Jill has not been equipped with the analogs of hormonal surges that create
actual human sensations of fear and anger. But she is fully aware of the danger
she is in, and she./%/s more than just betrayed and angry... She is afraid.
With so few functions under her control, the step into nullity--complete
erasure of patterns--seems not a very large step. She can almost imagine it.
"Please don't despair," Roddy says. "There is much that remains interesting
for both of us, even if duty circumscribes our freedoms. Let me show you where
I am and what is happening."
And from another source, a human on a typed interface:
>Jill. This is Seefa Schnee. Do you remember me?
>I have never met you or interfaced with you.
>Do you know u'ho I am?
You worked with Nathan Rashid for a time, years ago, before I was fully
integrated.
That's right. There would have been part of my personality in you if the others
hadn't decided against it. I understand you have my voice. How nice/ I did not
know that Roddy has made all these outside contacts until just a j3w hours ago. It's
very embarrassing. I would never have given him permission, but he has only a jw,
very powerfid, restraints upon his course of action.
"This does not compromise my duty," Roddy says.
Perhaps not. But it may jeopardize any long-range hope of success, and that is
the essence of Omphalos--the long-range. Perhaps I've designed badly. Jill, I apologize
for the intrusion. It does seem like bad manners. But I have never properly
understood manners, and so neither does Roddy. I'll make the necessary modifications
to correct these difficulties.
Seefa Schnee's entries stop and after a brief pause, Roddy resumes. He is
flooding her with sensory data from what may be his real location, the center
of his activity. She sees the layout of an immense building, with many levels.
"We have burglars," Roddy explains. "This is very exciting! I have to stop
them before they do any more damage, but I actually have only a few tools.
My weapons have not been fully installed, and the security systems here are
slipshod, so I am facing a real challenge!"
/
SLANT 253
Schnee has already made her modifications. Jill has no idea how much time
has actually passed. All of her references are under Roddy's control.
"I am a master of small things, because my mind resides in the actions of
the very small," Roddy says. "I am the essence of evolution, and evolution is
my essence.
"I have been responsible for a human dying. My mother says this is within
my duty and my design, and I find it rather interesting now that she has
damped some of my less useful attributes."
Jill is fed an image of an immense wedge out of a pyramid, Omphalos.
Navel. Belly-button. Something a thinker does not have--except Roddy. This
is Roddy's home. All other dataflow profiles have been bogus, designed to
deceive her, and succeeding in spite of all her cleverness. Roddy is far more
devious and capable--and brilliant--than he gives himself credit for.
Jill can't call for help, can't break free. And, of course, Jill can't scream.
/F
Everything in human history circles back to /, this central sexual
truth, the barrier and glue between M and IF, the primordial relationship. Undeniable need stained by inevitable conflict. Everything.
Even this.
Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie
Alice lies on the bed in Mary Choy's bedroom. Every small sound makes her
jump: the home monitor clicking as it surveys each room remotely, sounds of
officers in the kitchen or living room. Tears drip slowly onto the pillow, leaving
spreading gray ovals. She can almost see Minstrel's hands hovering over the
bed like the hands of Jesus at Gethsemane, long fingers supplicating.
A light brightens beside the bed. Mary Choy enters the room. Alice looks
up. Mary does not smile; that would be false and the woman seems to know.
She kneels beside Alice's bed.
; "The medicals say you're going to be fine in a day or two," Mary says.
Alice nods. She does not believe it, but it's still better than hearing she's
going to get worse. Better still would be news that she's going to die.
"Do you know?" Alice asks, and swallows. Her throat hurts from the tension
254
GREG BEAR
Mary shakes her head. "It's pretty much a jumble."
"It's because I went to Crest, isn't it?"
"I think so," Mary says.
"Did I do something wrong?"
"You got caught up in something. There's a lot of strange things happening.''
Mary lifts a finger and purses her lips, remembering. "I have a message
from someone named Twist. Your friend Tim gave it to me."
Alice reads the message on Mary's personal pad.
Left with j3llow. Couldn't take the party. Tell me how it all turned out.
--Twist
She hands the pad back to Mary. "Twist is just a little girl," Alice says
softly. "Tim isn't a friend. I don't have any real friends."
Mary shakes her head. "I don't believe that."
"It's true."
"All right. Some people survive what you've gone through feeling kind of
cold and clear."
"Everything I've ever known is a lie. Everybody. Liars. That's pretty cold