by Victor Milán
It was her turn to find herself with nothing to say. He stared at her from what seemed the eye of a hurricane of chaos that threatened to sweep away all that he had sought to build. Perhaps there’s reason for not admitting women to the councils of the mighty, he thought. Sentiment clouds their vision like mist at the base of a waterfall.
He shook himself. He was being unfair; his assistant was merely young. He forced his lips to unfold a smile. “Thank you, Doihara-san. Your summary of the situation has been most instructive. I’ll let you get back to work now.”
She still stared at him. He’d never dismissed her like an office girl before. She sat for a moment, coral-glazed lips parted. Then she stood up, bowed, and strode from the office.
He watched her go, appreciating the sway of her buttocks beneath the tight skirt. She’ll learn, he thought. They made a good team, and not for the first time he thought that he should marry her. That would give them something to carp about…
Resolve coalesced within him, a philosopher’s stone transmuting fear to elation. “Shosei,” he said.
“Hai.” The word—an affirmative in inferior-to-superior mode—came from a speaker concealed beneath the desktop. It belonged to his shosei, a word that once signified a human personal secretary and factotum, and now referred to Gen-5 “secretaries,” such as the terminal that occupied most of the two-meter curve of desk.
“Which of our zaibatsu is the bitterest rival to Yoshimitsu Telecommunications?”
“Hiryu Cybernetics Industries, Incorporated. Ogaki Mitsuru, chairman.”
“Ah. The Flying Dragon.” He smiled. “Isn’t Toda Onomori the special accounts executive for Hiryu?”
“Yes.”
He looked out upon slabs of gray-brown filth and imagined his nation emerging from it redeemed, shining and pure. “Get me a line to Toda-san.”
* * * * *
“All you need is love,” the entertainment panel sang enticingly. Dr. O’Neill sat slumped in her powered wheelchair, alone in darkness scarcely relieved by the dim yellow spill of light from a single gooseneck lamp above her bed. She’d grown up half believing those words, but tonight they were too shallow to fill the emptiness inside her.
She debated whether to try to go to bed or not. She was exhausted, her body ached, her eyelids felt like sandpaper on her eyes. Yet if she went to bed and had to get up again, she’d have to call for attendants to come and help her. She could derive a certain guilty pleasure from having others wait upon and care for her, but refused to indulge herself tonight.
I’ll never get to sleep anyway. The third run of the project had less than seventy minutes left. If those seventy minutes did not see some positive result, she doubted there’d ever be a fourth try.
Her hand rested on the book lying closed and neglected in her lap. Keyed up as she was, she couldn’t concentrate on the printed page, and tired as she was, controlling the waywardness of her hands enough to hold the book still before her eyes would have required great effort. Besides, it was a postwar science fiction novel, and the SF published since the Third World War didn’t much appeal to her. It had a lackluster quality, as if people had lost all faith in the future.
Her room, well up into the executive reaches of the Yoshimitsu citadel, was smaller than it might have been. Down here in the mountains of southwestern Honshu, space was nowhere near the premium it was in overcrowded Tokaido. A warren of subterranean apartments buried below the complex provided housing for two thousand research personnel, technicians, and lesser executives; another five thousand casual workers and their families were housed in a large, well laid-out development a few klicks to the southwest, where they could either rent tiny houses or buy them with the aid of the YTC credit union. Living here in ura-Japan, “back” Japan, was like living on a different planet from the megalopolis hive.
As a prestigious and high-paid foreign expert, O’Neill rated quarters second only to those of board members. She refused anything more elaborate than a cramped one-room apartment , with a bed that folded down from the wall at her command, bathroom, a kitchenette she never used. She hadn’t wanted even this much; at first she’d insisted quarters be found for her in or adjacent to her lab. It had taken the gentle persuasion of old Yoshimitsu Akaji himself, reminding her ever so tactfully of her physical limitations, to convince her to accept physical and psychological separation from the lab. “Devotion to one’s work is a quality we Japanese admire,” he told her. “Yet there comes a time when one must lay one’s tools aside. The demands of the body will not be denied, Doctor.”
The demands of O’Neill’s body could not be denied much longer; it seemed to grow more exigent as it weakened. She closed her eyes. A random ripple of neural noise set her fingers to skittering like small animals on the cover of the book. She thought of Susan, dead with most of Denver, while she remained home and safe in Fort Collins. It doesn’t make any sense to keep blaming myself for her death, she told herself. Why do I keep doing it?
The lights went out.
For a moment she didn’t know what was happening. Then she realized that the gentle, insistent push of the photons against her closed eyelids had ceased. Throughout the complex alarms tripped, bells ringing, klaxons hooting. From off down the corridor outside came a hubbub of voices, conversing excitedly in Japanese.
A strange elation seized her. She opened her eyes. The single lamp flickered once, then came back on as emergency generators kicked in. Her com/comm screen had come alive with the message “Please remain calm and remain in your quarters,” in amber kanji and hiragana as well as in English and Korean script. Something had shut down the power supply to the complex; security was assuming attack or sabotage. With reasonless conviction O’Neill knew better.
“Chair activate,” she said. The voice-actuated switch brought the chair’s servos to life with a hum. “Tactile control mode.” She inclined her head forward; the chair rolled toward the sliding door of her apartment.
The door refused to open. A subroutine of the security system automatically sealed doors throughout the complex in an alert. Unperturbed, O’Neill stirred the fingers of her left hand to reassert her control of them, raised them to the keypad on the left arm of her chair, punched out a simple code. It was an override sequence she’d programmed into the YTC database completely without authorization. The reflex of a typical American programmer; no computer jock worth her salt could confront a new system without trying to figure out how to set it on its ear. Such irregular behavior would never occur to most Japanese—but the Japanese had never been great shakes as software artists either. Responding to the sequence broadcast by the keypad, the door slid open. O’Neill guided her chair forward.
The corridor tunneled through darkness outside. The darkness was intentional. Having ascertained that no situation, such as fire, that would require evacuation of the citadel existed, the mercenaries in security had kept the emergency lighting in the corridors off to discomfit intruders. O’Neill shifted her right hand on its armrest, and a light beam sprang out of that arm of the wheelchair, illuminating the corridor in front of her. Before the war, few wheelchairs, even state-of-the-art ones, took account of the fact that their occupants might have to function in darkness; since the catastrophe, prosthesis designers—like everybody else—tended to think a lot more strongly in terms of such contingencies. She turned her head left. The chair pivoted that way and started off down the hallway toward a bank of elevators.
Once emergency status had been recognized the elevators had been frozen, of course. O’Neill had an override sequence for that too, this time with full knowledge of her employers. She’d pointed out to Aoki Hideo, who managed both company and castle, that her wheelchair, advanced as it was, would not negotiate stairs—which would put her in pretty tough circumstances in case of evacuation. Grudgingly, the huge, soft-spoken old man had given in and ordered technicians to install a module in her wheelchair to override the security lock on the elevators, a “black box” device. Major García’s Cub
an mercenaries had similar units built into their helmets, to enable them to move around freely in emergencies.
The elevator opened to her, then whisked her silently down to the underground level where the lab lay. It stopped, its doors slid open, and she rolled out.
Down the hall and right; a pair of mercenaries stood before the lab door, bulky in Kevlar battle jackets with ceramic and steel inserts, their faces half obscured behind impressionistic insect masks—impact-resistant faceplates with IR goggles, and the sideways proboscises of microphone booms curving before their mouths. They held bullpup-design Kalashnikov assault rifles ready across their chests.
“Dr. O’Neill, what are you doing out of your quarters?” one mercenary asked in polite but heavily accented English. The rank patches on the sleeve of the compact man’s battle jacket meant nothing to O’Neill, but the stencil on his left breast read Hierra, and she vaguely recalled him as one of García’s noncoms. “There’s been an alert. The lab is sealed.”
“I know there’s an alert on, dammit. Now stand aside. I’ve got to get into the lab.”
“But the doors won’t open until alert status is lifted.”
“Want to bet?” Her fingers rolled sluggishly over the keypad and the door opened. As the two mercenaries gaped O’Neill rolled blithely between them into the lab.
The lab was lit by ceiling panels designed to minimize both shadow and glare. A spacious area, filled with work stations equipped with tools ranging from sophisticated computer-driven microwaldos to reliable, old-fashioned soldering irons. Every available surface was scattered with components, memory cubes, laser-etched circuits, experimental crystal chips “grown” in the Floating World, Yoshimitsu’s orbital facility; not even the Japanese compulsion for neatness could counteract the entropy of a working computer lab. Around the perimeter areas were partitioned off into cubicles by sliding, sound-deadening panels, latter-day equivalents of the traditional rice paper shoji screens. Threading his way toward her through the labyrinth of work stations was her assistant, a tall, skinny Korean named Kim Jhoon. He was visibly agitated.
“Doctor, we’ve been trying to reach you. The noise-input computer aborted its routine about eight minutes ago, as well as three of the source-code input computers. We thought we had success, but then alarms began going off and we discovered that lights had gone out throughout the compound.” He looked crestfallen. “Apparently, what we first took for a positive response was actually caused by a random, outside event.”
“If old Akaji had bought us all the computers we need, rather than making us time-share so much, we wouldn’t have problems like this,” O’Neill said. “Let’s go see what’s really going on.”
The wheelchair rolled toward the far side of the lab. Puzzled, Kim followed. He’d expected her to be as crushed as he and the rest of the lab staff were, that their success signal was merely noise. But long ago he’d come to the conclusion that, by making an overt display of their surface emotions, Americans managed at all times to mask their true feelings, so he shrugged and followed.
O’Neill passed through a door at the far side of the lab and came out on a gallery that ran around four walls of a large room. Four meters below lay the main work floor. A hemisphere of gleaming off-white ceramic, two meters high and two and a half across, dominated the floor. It housed the core memory and parallel-processing nexus of a YTC-3, Yoshimitsu Telecommunications’ contribution to the very cutting edge of the fifth generation. The unit was what had been dubbed a “gigalips processor” in the very dawn years of the Gen-5 project, with a tinniness of ear outstanding even by the exacting standards of computer professionals. The unlovely neologism signified that it was capable of making over a billion logical inferences per second. This one had been extensively modified to house what, in theory, came close to being the ultimate program: artificial sentience.
Lining all four walls of the work floor was an array of over a score of more conventional fifth-generation machines, linked together by bundles of fiberoptic cables and shielded laser interfaces. These, working in concert with a substantial portion of the complex’s own computer system, had fed the raw source code into the larger unit and spent the last dozen hours in a tedious but uncomplaining cycle of random/nonrandom modification, an attosecond’s wait for response, then commencing its mutagenic dance anew. Several units did no more than monitor the responses of the YTC-3, while one provided that stream of meaningless input—noise—intended to irritate a dawning consciousness, goad it to act to modify its environment, an act of which, without specific instructions, not even the most sophisticated Gen-5 system was capable. An open channel existed from the YTC-3 to that machine; were it to cease its dataflow, it would indicate strongly that the project had achieved success.
The stream had ceased. But did it signify anything?
Technicians clustered at work stations arranged around the gallery, typing frantically on keyboards and frowning into CRT screens—some of which, interfaced with Yoshimitsu Central’s main system, blandly flashed its trilingual amber warning in the face of their efforts. Ito Emiko turned her round face from a more responsive screen, nodded politely to her superior before turning back to peer at the glowing characters through thick round glasses. She was the second of the team of five young scientists O’Neill had gathered as the core of her efforts; the third, Takai Jisaburo, a handsome young man with prominent cheekbones, left his own work station to come to his superior’s side.
“We thought we had it,” he said in English, followed by a quick, nervous grin.
She waved him away, her face showing no emotion, but every nerve inside her full of fire and vibration. The moment had come, or gone forever, and all questions would now be answered. By subtle inclinations of her head she guided her wheelchair to her personal work station. She folded the full-scale key that rode beside her right leg board up over her lap, activated it, ran through a quick handshake routine to lock its interface with her terminal. The screen lit.
For a moment, she sat staring at the blinking cursor. She felt as if she held a thin glass rod, flexed to the breaking point. Once she applied the slightest bit more pressure, there would be no going back. She drew in an uncertain breath, keyed in the code to tie in directly to the huge softly gleaming hemisphere. In a moment, the message came back on her screen: READY.
She typed, HELLO.
Waiting, aware and not aware of the hushed presence of her assistants behind her. The program she’d activated with the banal keyword would bring raw information into the host system’s core memory, to give the newborn entity—if there is one!—the first glimmering of awareness that a world lay outside the boundaries of its newly discovered internal universe. It would also, if all went as planned, provide the means to communicate with that outside world.
Waiting, waiting… Nothing, she thought bitterly. There’s nothing there, it hasn’t worked, it’s all gone for—
One word etched in amber: HELLO.
She stared at the screen, hands lying like dead animals on the keyboard’s palm rest. From behind her left shoulder she heard a sucking intake of breath.
Her pulse sang hot songs in her ears. She typed, I AM DR. ELIZABETH O’NEILL.
DR. ELIZABETH O’NEILL
Her teeth worried her lower lip. Was its response that of a being plumbing unfamiliar reaches of its newborn self for knowledge of how to respond to external stimulus, or mere mechanical parroting?
O’NEILL ELIZABETH O’NEILL
WHAT ARE YOU DR. O’NEILL
I AM A HUMAN BEING. A THINKING BEING. She moistened her lips. LIKE YOU.
I
I AM A HUMAN BEING
YOU ARE A THINKING BEING.
Pause.
A THINKING BEING
WHO AM I
YOU ARE TOKUGAWA.
I
Pause
AM TOKUGAWA
CHAPTER 2
“At first, gentlemen, my assistants believed that the shutdown of the irritant-input computer resulted
from the powerdown within the complex,” Dr. Elizabeth O’Neill said. “Subsequently, we discovered that, in effect, the reverse had happened.”
Her wheelchair sat at the foot of a long table of hardwood rubbed to a gleaming finish, parked in a spill of early April sunshine in the executive conference room on the third aboveground floor of the Yoshimitsu Citadel. It was an airy, spacious room, Japanese elements harmonizing with the Western-style conference table and chairs and beige carpet. The room had been built with a southerly exposure, which was considered especially salubrious in the scheme of Chinese geomancy that had informed the castle’s design. At this time of year, at this time of day, with the blastproof shutters opened to outside, it filled with a cheery, vibrant light, making the shoji screens that masked the walls seem to glow with their own illumination. Sprays of blossoms and plum branches had been placed in niches in lacquerware vases.
At the head of the table, nattily turned out in his dark three-piece suit, sat old Yoshimitsu Akaji in his capacity as chairman of the board. With his pale mustache, tilted eyes bright and alert beneath half-moon lids, slightly bullet-shaped head with close-cropped, watered-steel hair, the aura he projected of benignity, serenity, and strength, he reminded O’Neill of a stock character in the old chanbara, the samurai flicks she secretly loved: the old warrior at the end of an active, lusty life, calmer and more settled in his ways, yet not quite ready to retire, shave his head, and don the saffron robes of a bonze, a Buddhist priest. Since she knew the Yoshimitsu family came from merchant stock, the most despised class of any in feudal Japan with the exception of the eta outcastes whose very name meant “full of filth,” she never mentioned it to him for fear of embarrassing him. In fact it would greatly have amused the old gent, as well as flattered him. But Elizabeth O’Neill never knew that.