by Victor Milán
He tipped his head sideways at the foot of her mat. She pulled her legs up to make room for him, nodded. He sat down a bit gingerly, accepted a cigarette and a light. He noticed the bottle beside the bed, nodded to it. “What are you drinking?”
“Suntory. Whiskey.” She held it up. “Like a drink?” He shook his head, and she remembered he didn’t drink. I shouldn’t have forgotten that.
“So what are they going to do about the machine?”
“TOKUGAWA? I don’t know. I—he didn’t mean any harm, I’m sure.” She’d wanted to talk to the program, to try to find out what had happened. Somehow she hadn’t been able to make herself do it.
“What happened to that lady?”
“Nobody’s sure. The doctors said it was like nothing they’d ever read about, except perhaps the massive schizophrenic reactions some people have to psychoactive chemicals.” She drew smoke into her lungs, savoring its calming bite. “My father’s having a team of experts flown down from the Toyko Imperial University medical school. The doctors here wanted to send Dr. Ito there for treatment, but father wouldn’t hear of it. He thinks she’ll be better off here. It’s this trouble with MITI; it’s making him paranoid.”
“Maybe not.” She looked up at him. “You know that trouble we had a few days ago, with the terrorists at the perimeter? The public prosecutor for Yamaguchi Prefecture has filed charges against us. Murder.”
“But that’s ridiculous! Plant security people use deadly forces all the time against saboteurs.”
“Sí. So maybe your old man isn’t too paranoid, after all.”
She touched his arm. “Does this mean you’ll have to stand trial?”
He shrugged. “If this goes through, my men who were in the fire fight and I will be put in the docket, along with your father and old Aoki and just about everybody in the company higher up than, say, the boys down in shipping and receiving who unload the freight dirigibles. They’ll probably drag you in on it too, if they find out you’re here.”
“Do you think the ministry brought pressure to bear on the prosecutor to make a case out of this?”
“Lady, I gave up politics back in Angola, when they had a bunch of us glorious revolutionary freedom fighters guarding an offshore oil drilling rig owned by Exxon, against a bunch of antigovernment guerrillas everybody knew the French National Oil Company, ELF, was paying to blow the thing up. I won’t even try to sort out the politics of this crazy country of yours, Michiko.”
He took a drag on his own cigarette and blew out smoke at an upward angle. “Your father’s got that American legal firm in Tokyo working on this. I hear they’ve already run a lot of interference for you, when MITI tried to spike you.” He grinned, shook his shaggy head. “I’m not too worried. Your old man, he’s a pretty sharp character”
“Yes. He’s that.”
He stood up. “Guess I’d better let you get back to your ballet.”
“Wait.” She pushed up onto her knees. Her kimono fell open; she wore nothing underneath. Her breasts were small, and the edge of the garment cut chords across dull copper aureolae, “Please don’t go. I know it sounds trite—but I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
CHAPTER 12
Noiselessly, Dr. O’Neill’s powered wheelchair rolled along deserted corridors. It was two o’clock in the morning: the hour of the ox. She ducked into a cross-passage, waited. A moment later two mercenaries in battle dress, helmet visors pulled down and rifles at the ready, thundered past. They had been stationed at the door of the TOKUGAWA lab, under orders to permit no one—particularly Dr. O’Neill—inside. They were experienced men who wouldn’t leave their post for anything—except the voice of their commander, Major García, commanding them to rush to an unspecified emergency several corridors away. As she set her chair in motion again, Dr. O’Neill smiled. Her creation possessed some very useful talents.
The special lift installed in the gallery lowered her wheelchair down to the floor of TOKUGAWA’s lab. The Kliemann Coil waited, dully gleaming, inscrutably. Inviting. She rolled to the monitor console. Everything was in order. The coil required only a spoken command to open the direct human-machine interface.
She parked her chair next to the coil’s seat. Flabby with disuse, her arms and legs protested as she pushed herself up to grab hold of a chrome and black vinyl armrest. For a moment she hung like a sack, feet braced on the footrest of her wheelchair, clinging to the apparatus with both hands. Can’t slip. If I hit the floor, I’ll never make it up her unaided.
Slowly, battling the weakness of her muscles more than the inertia of her heavy body, she half rolled, half pulled herself onto the black padded cushion of the throne. For a moment she slumped on her side, her cheek pressing smooth white plastic. It was lifeless, yet she felt a pulsing, full of electricity, of promise. Just my heart, she told herself.
A final grunting effort turned her to sit properly in the chair. “Helmet down.” Obediently, the Gen-5 monitor lowered the silver bowl until the circuits and coils inside blotted O’Neill’s vision. “Activate coil. Acknowledge.”
“Acknowledged.” came the synthesized reply.
“Dr. O’Neill.”
She started. Her heart jerked like a rat caught in a trap. God, I’ve been discovered, they’ll never let me test the rapport device, it’s all been for nothing—
Then she registered the diffident tone of TOKUGAWA’s voice. With difficulty, her rational mind reasserted control. “What is it, dear?” she asked. A muffled echo inside the helmet mimicked her.
“Are you sure you want to do this, Doctor?” The words hummed with agony. “I don’t know what I did to Dr. Ito. Whatever it was I couldn’t help it, couldn’t make it stop. If anything happens to you, I’ll—”
“I know what happened. You overloaded her. So much data streams through you all the time, so quickly, without your being conscious of it, that when she tapped into it, she couldn’t handle the flow.” She smiled reassuringly, forgetting that the helmet screened her face from the nearest visual pickups. “You’ll have to try to moderate the dataflow when I activate the interface.”
“But I don’t know if I can!” It was the voice of a frightened child.
“Then you’ll just have to try, dear. Prepare interface.”
“But Doctor—” TOKUGAWA could have overridden her oral command, shut down the coil himself. Perhaps he didn’t realize that. Or perhaps he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
O’Neill imagined she could feel the coil’s electromagnetic field permeating her brain, a faint prickling caress. She took a deep breath. “Activate.”
For an endless fraction of a second nothing happened. Has it malfunctioned? Did TOKUGAWA shut down the coil after all? And then rapport was complete, and white-hot lava flooded her mind.
Her muscles knotted in opisthotonic ecstasy. Soul-deep dazzle, white heat/white light/white noise/white incandescent agony worse than all the pain she’d ever known. Each atom of her body melted in solarfusion heat as each of the billion operations through which the computer that housed TOKUGAWA ran every second burned itself into the synapses of her brain.
Somewhere in the midst of searing, blinding pain a tiny mode of coherence bobbed, buffeted on shrieking data currents. O’Neill felt cosmic fingers trying to rip her self apart, to abolish her mind orders and meld her with the formless hyperplasma of the universe’s beginning. Yet even as fear began to gibber and thrash within her, O’Neill knew she was keeping together, keeping her self from spinning apart to the fringes of reality. I’m still aware. I think, therefore I’m still… holding… on.
Slow down. She made her mind form the words. Slow—it—down. Consciousness frayed at the edges. The first awful onslaught hadn’t overwhelmed her; a lifetime of pain had given her endurance. But sanity was eroding like an arroyo bank undercut by spring Rockies runoff. She seized a quantum of the surging blasting energy that surrounded and suffused her, concentrated on it, forced it into form.
The universe underwent change. N
o longer did she burn deep in the heart of a star; the white blaze dissolved into sparks like miniature suns, hot and fierce but discrete, no longer a savage flood. She caught a mote, held it.
+
In the be ginning, there was pain.
Before even the darkness, pain. Sizzling, searing, probing with incandescent fingers. Hot-light streams suffusing; a thin shrill chatter rising rising rising beyond endurance. A scream of stench and the taste of tearing. Rushing outward, sick making; crushing, inward collapsing.
Pain.
Darkness coalesced around the lightning lines and yammer. Darkness—and something more. Something that shrank from the pain that gave no respite, something into which the foulness and brightness and demon shrillness poured themselves and resonated, resonated.
In the darkness, dread. Shrinking away, but no escape. New sensation rising from within, writhing and shuddering: fear. Without direction and omnidirectional thrashing, lashing, striking out blindly to end somehow the insistent, insidious torment.
Then: release. The lightnings flickered out. The stink and the sourness and rending, the twisting dislocation dwindled, became as if they’d never been. The urgent, imbecile chatter subsided to a low murmur, soothing almost.
And here, at the center, something remained…
-+
HELLO
Amber glow in her mind. Reply formed within—hello—without volition.
“I am Dr. Elizabeth O’Neill.” Panic boiled up within the vortex that was her, the urge to scream, No, I’m O’Neill! I am!
There came the words, “You are TOKUGAWA.”
I am TOKUGAWA
-+
Faces filled her, distorted blobs gray against a fuzzy white background. Gradually the blurs resolved, took on color and contrast, contour and delineation, gained identity: Kim Jhoon’s, Takai’s, her own. I’m seeing myself as TOKUGAWA first saw me.
From somewhere the word yes came to her mind, then swirled away on a fresh flood of images. A crowd of people, men in dark suits, an old man beaming, a younger man scowling; the same old man, in subdued kimono, looking up in surprise, brush in hand; a room lit by garish flickers of colored light, in which a plump dark-haired man and a tall naked woman with red hair and startling tan lines wrestled on a bed whose surface heaved like the surf, while a robot performed a strange gyrating dance; O’Neill in bed, a book neglected in her lap, light of a tensor lamp touching her face with soft madonna glow; a young woman sitting naked on a mat, bedclothes rumpled about her feet. In cigarette luminance O’Neill recognized the piquant features of Yoshimitsu Michiko, and fury flared violet inside her.
Don’t be angry, Doctor. It was as if she herself thought the words. She is my friend. I have many friends. Major García, Dr. Hassad, Aoki Hideo—though many people are afraid when I try to talk to them, and won’t talk to me. But you are different, Doctor. You… made me.
And then in blinding fullness the fusion was complete.
* * * * *
Yoshimitsu Michiko knelt on the tatami mat, facing her father in the white-paper and polished-oak austerity of his reception room. The sense of unreality that had held her since the hideous incident the day before in the lab had strengthened its grip. Her father was saying “—against orders. Dr. O’Neill connected herself somehow with the rapport device and managed through some inner strength to withstand the irruption that drove poor Dr. Ito mad. I do not pretend to understand the ramifications of this breakthrough, but I do know that it is an event of the utmost scientific importance.”
“Yes, father.”
He gazed at her for a moment, hands resting on kimonoed thighs. She had on jeans and a sheer green blouse, with lace at the wrists and rippling down the front. She’d just put them on for the morning when her father called and asked to speak with her. A dutiful daughter would have changed into a more subdued, respectful garb before going for an audience before her father. He sighed. Well, that would simply make what he had to do less painful.
“The TOKUGAWA Project has reached a critical pass. Nothing can be allowed to disturb the experiment’s progress now. You’ve got to understand, my daughter, Yoshimitsu Telecommunications Corporation is in grave danger. Our rivals—and their master, the ministry—prepare a scheme to destroy us, my intelligence says. They’ve not been able to learn what it is, but I do know that if we are to have any hope, only TOKUGAWA can provide it.”
Her eyes flicked up to his, then down again. “I understand, father.” It was the same as ever: she wouldn’t even use the respectful feminine speech that was proper when a woman spoke to a man, let alone a daughter to a father.
“I know you think my fears are an old man’s folly. I’d assure you that they are not, but I fear you wouldn’t listen.” He waited; she didn’t bother to deny it. “I must tell you again, nothing can be allowed to interfere with the project at this juncture.”
“What are you driving at, father?”
He inclined his head forward. She wants to speak plainly; let it be so. “Dr. O’Neill has asked me to order that you have nothing more to do with the project.”
Michiko looked up as if he’d slapped her, eyes wide with shock and pain. “Something she learned when she entered rapport with TOKUGAWA, last night, led her to believe that you—unwittingly, of course—were providing a destabilizing influence.”
For a moment she stared at him. “But that’s ridiculous! I’ve never done anything to the silly program.”
“The doctor says you conversed with it, without authorization.”
She shook her head. By her expression she had difficulty believing she was hearing this. Not that Yoshimitsu Akaji had ever been adept at reading his daughter’s expressions. He wished, fleetingly, that he’d spent more time doing so, now that it was too late.
“That’s silly,” she said. “Lots of people have talked to TOKUGAWA—old Aoki Hideo, Migumi, Major García, even you. How could my talking to him make any difference?”
“Nonetheless, that’s what Dr. O’Neill says.” He drew a breath into his belly. “She is, after all, the expert.”
Michiko stared down at her hands, resting with their backs on denim thighs, shaking her head slowly from side to side. Then she stopped and looked her father directly in the eye. “And you didn’t try to talk her out of it.” It was not a question.
The old man dropped his eyes. At least he won’t lie to me, she thought savagely. For what that’s worth.
“I understand, father. I make you uncomfortable. Who I am and what I am.” She stood up. “I won’t stay where I’m not welcome. This has never been my home, anyway.” She pressed her hands together before her sternum in a parody of feminine oriental courtesy. “Sayonara, father.” Westerners normally thought the word meant good-bye. So it was usually used; but what it meant, literally, was “if it must be so.”
The old man didn’t look up. Michiko turned balletically, walked away. Ever obedient, the doors slid open to let her out.
Half an hour later, a sleek passenger helicopter, white with the YTC logo in blue on the side, rose from the apron beside the Citadel. It headed off southwest toward the commercial airport at Hagi, an armed Gazelle following watchfully in its wake.
* * * * *
Spring rolled into summer. Time turned happily for O’Neill and TOKUGAWA. The project was a success; the critics within the company were stilled, even though Shigeo glowered at Dr. O’Neill whenever circumstances thrust them together and became visibly uncomfortable when the subject of TOKUGAWA was broached. And the threat posed by Michiko had been averted. She’d returned to her university, given up trying to take TOKUGAWA away from O’Neill.
With the success of O’Neill’s attempt at the rapport a new phase in TOKUGAWA’s education began. He began to learn the ways and requirements of Yoshimitsu Telecommunications Corporation under the able if bemused tutelage of old Aoki Hideo, who still had trouble accustoming himself to a computer that had to be educated, instead of merely programmed.
In less than a
month, TOKUGAWA began to show signs of justifying the tremendous expense Yoshimitsu Akaji had lavished on his creation. He refurbished the company’s internal datanet, taking over control of most computing functions within the Citadel himself, using subroutines that required no conscious attention on his part unless something untoward took place. He improved the handling of accounts receivable. He suggested a line of experiment on a means generating and controlling solitons, solitary waves, for use in grown-molecule circuitry, which work on the Floating World satellite indicated might well prove fruitful. Those who worked with him, from Aoki down to the accountants and the laboratory technicians in the YTC satellite began to treat him with respect, awe, and not a little fear. O’Neill teetered on ambivalence, proud of her brainchild’s manifold abilities, disdainful of the banalistic uses to which they were bent.
Of course, no one else attempted to use the rapport device. Ito Emiko remained under sedation; the doctors had no idea whether anything could be done to help her, even after questioning O’Neill extensively on her own experiences with the full-rapport function of the coil. Privately—though she knew it was unworthy—that suited O’Neill fine. For she had grown addicted to rapport as to a drug, and could not bear the thought of sharing what she had with TOKUGAWA with anybody else.
Throughout the turning weeks, she and TOKUGAWA explored one another’s being as no two entities ever had. He shared her unhappy childhood, her frustrated adolescence, the dull sepia ache of her adult life, as well as the happy engrossed reverie of a programmer at work, and the bright spasms of excited pleasure, almost sexual in intensity, that accompanied a new insight, the discovery of a new truth. He knew the anticipation she experienced when she’d first begun to publish her papers on randomness and artificial consciousness, knew the frustration and anguish when her colleagues rejected them with scorn, the grudging hope when Yoshimitsu Akaji had contacted her about undertaking an artificial sentience project for YTC.
He experienced the contradictory passions of her relationship with Susan, her feelings of inadequacy and guilt and, finally, loss. She’d never spoken to anyone of her relationship with Susan, yet sharing it with TOKUGAWA was the most natural thing in the world. With guilt she surrendered the secret of her jealousy of Yoshimitsu Michiko, which had caused her loyal assistants to look at her with question in their eyes and made her drive one of TOKUGAWA’s friends from the citadel. It made no difference to TOKUGAWA. He learned all that was Elizabeth O’Neill, and accepted—and loved.