Slant

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

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  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

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  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

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  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