California kitsch this time, Monique thought.
But if this doesn’t work, I don’t know what will. . . .
“John . . .” she purred gently. “You’re back home now . . . back in California . . . back where it all began . . . remember . . . remember when . . . ?”
The musculature of Davinda’s face, frozen into a horrified mask, began to slowly relax. . . .
“Yes, John Sri Davinda, that’s who you are now, back when, way back when . . .”
Davinda’s face smoothed out, but not into anything Monique could recognize as an expression of human emotion. Rather it became another mask, this a tranquil one, but with nothing behind the eyes but an empty void.
“Come on, John, I know you’re in there, so come on out,” Monique said in a rather harsher tone of voice, fighting against her rising exasperation, and beginning to lose.
Nothing.
Damn!
Or damned.
For Monique was running out of ideas as well as patience, and she found her eyes being drawn downward to the purse beside her. Felt the invisible presence of the gun pulsing inside it.
Or not?
Might that not be another illusion?
If she just reached down and palpated the purse, might she not happily discover that there was no flechette pistol inside it?
Her hand started to move toward the purse. She yanked it back, and convulsively shook Davinda by the shoulder instead.
“Talk to me, talk to me, will you!” she shouted. “Before it’s too late.”
“It’s not working,” said Eric.
“No shit, Sherlock,” said Ignatz.
“Any more bright ideas?”
“Is that an operational question?”
“Yes, Mom, it’s an operational question,” Eric said testily, “and I’d appreciate an operational answer.”
“Maybe it’s time to terminate the operation, kiddo,” Ignatz suggested.
Eric pondered this for a long moment.
Sooner or later, if Monique failed to get any more information out of Davinda, he was going to have to go in there and terminate the operation. Was it now later than sooner? Was unprofessional sentimental romanticism the only thing preventing him from doing it?
“That’s the only operational advice you have?” Eric asked plaintively.
“What’s preventing you from taking it, kiddo? Why don’t you just ice him and get it over with?”
“Because I don’t want to make a terrible mistake that could end up maybe frying the whole world, damn it!” Eric snapped.
“That’s all, Eric?”
“That isn’t enough?”
“Come on, kiddo, you can’t bullshit a simulation of a bullshitter!”
“All right, all right,” Eric whined, “so the idea of framing Monique Calhoun for the hit turns my stomach! There, I’ve said it, are you satisfied, Mom?”
Mom?
Eric abruptly realized he was trying to justify himself to this . . . this program as if he really were arguing with his mother.
And losing as usual.
“Well, kiddo, there is one thing you could try,” Ignatz said. “You gotta remember, I’m only a simulation, and a female one at that, so it’s kind of hard for me to model how you’re gonna take this. . . .”
“I’m a big bad boy, Mom . . . I mean . . . jeez!”
“You got the place pumped full of brain stimulants, and the guy’s still tranced out,” said Ignatz. “So maybe you’re . . . playing the wrong organ. According to the database this simulation is supplied with kiddo, you wanna raise a male zombie from the dead, you gotta . . . grab him by the handle.”
When Monique felt the heat of her frustrated ire moving southward from her brain to her loins and becoming another form of warmth in the process, having no rational, emotional, or esthetic raison d’être for the transmutation and having experienced this illogical sexual arousal in similar circumstances before, she was certain that the effect had to be biochemical.
But while her first reaction was feminine outrage at Eric Esterhazy, this time around she knew exactly what he was doing, and found it difficult to argue with the why.
The why being the libidinal activation of John Sri Davinda and the effect on her being merely an unavoidable consequence, friendly fire as it were.
It hadn’t worked on Davinda the last time around, but the last time around, Davinda had been blotted on booze and dust to begin with. And this time around, the aphrogas in the atmosphere could be augmented with brain and somatic stimulants.
And thinking that very thought quite clearly with her loins afire, Monique realized that it probably was already. Which explained her mood swings and the sharpening of her insight.
Which also explained the logical clarity of her present thought under these extreme and unlikely circumstances. And even made her somewhat glad that she was under the influence of the aphrogas too.
It wasn’t going to make this fun.
But it might make it bearable.
“The climate model, John, this is where you created your climate model, tell me about the climate model. . . .”
Surely the queasy feeling Eric felt in the region between his stomach and his testicles wasn’t jealousy. He liked Monique Calhoun well enough, he found her sexually attractive, he had enjoyed their sexual fun and down-and-dirty games, but he certainly wasn’t in love with her.
Nor was the gruesome spectacle on the screen sexually arousing or anything to be jealous about. Monique had opened Davinda’s fly, withdrawn a semi-flaccid organ, and managed to massage it to a more-or-less erect state, thanks mainly, no doubt, to the aphrogas, given that the still-vacant expression on Davinda’s face gave little evidence of the involvement of his cerebral centers in the proceedings.
Now she was working his phallic pump handle forcefully and mechanically. It was about as erotic as watching a machine milking a cow.
“Come on, John, I know you’re in there, come on out . . .” Monique wheedled, working her hand without looking, and trying unsuccessfully to force the ludicrously obscene visual image of what she was doing from the screen of her mind by focusing on the face, on the eyes, of John Sri Davinda.
Who seemed to be slowly coming to show some semblance of human life, a parting of the lips, a soundless moan, another, a rapid flickering of the eyelids . . .
And then Monique had a small satori.
If Davinda was a mole, then, to judge from the way the Marenkos kept repeating it to him, “Lao” was probably some kind of activation command.
And an activation command was certainly what she needed now.
“Lao . . . John . . . Lao . . . Lao . . . Lao . . .”
She moved her hand in time to the chant, took more care to halt teasingly on the upstroke, and bring it half-satisfyingly down on the beat. . . .
“Lao . . . Lao . . . Lao . . .”
“Lao . . .” Davinda finally muttered.
“Yes, John, Lao!”
Monique ceased her stroking and held her hand in place, clenching and releasing, clenching and releasing, trying, as it were, to squeeze it out of him.
“Lao, John, Lao . . .”
“Lao . . .”
“Lao is what?”
“Lao is the Chao of the Tao. . . .”
“Shit!” Monique snapped, giving him a convulsive yank.
Then she caught herself.
And took a long deep breath.
Enter his image system. Don’t expect him to enter yours.
“Lao is the Chao of the Tao,” she repeated, now trying to ease it out of him with gentle agreement and soft strokes. “Lao is the Chao of the Tao. . . .”
And then she had another little inspiration.
“Is Lao . . . the model of the Tao . . . ?”
“Lao models the condition of the Tao . . .” said Davinda.
An actual coherent sentence! Perhaps it was whatever cerebral enhancers Eric was pumping into this greenhouse California atmosphere, but Monique was beginn
ing to believe that she was not only entering into Davinda’s image system, but starting to decode it.
“Lao” was Davinda’s climate model.
The Tao, from her dim knowledge of such Third Force mumbo-jumbo, was the non-material, non-energetic, spiritual force underlying the universe of matter and energy, aka chi, prana, karma, whatever.
Codewise, in this image system, it probably stood for the planetary karma of the Earth.
“Chao” was all-too-unsettlingly obvious, the simple dropping of an “s” to make Chaos rhyme with “Lao” and “Tao.”
Davinda’s climate model was the Chaos of the planetary karma?
That appeared to be the message in this madness.
But it didn’t make any sense that Monique could fathom even from within this Third Force image system.
Unless . . .
“Lao models the condition of the Earth’s Tao . . . ?” she suggested, priming Davinda’s pump handle encouragingly. “And the condition of the Earth’s Tao is—”
“Chaos!” Davinda shouted.
“Condition Chaos?”
And before Monique could frame the next question, it all came gushing out in a torrent.
“Condition Chaos! Should I have known? How could I? No one suspected, not Braithwaite, not Pereiro, not Manning, not even the great Allison Larabee, how was I to know, yes, it was implicit in the data, but no program was powerful enough, not before Lao, and even the early iterations of Lao couldn’t show it, the hardware wasn’t good enough, what was I supposed to do then, tell them, they would’ve canceled the program, Lao would never have been fully implemented, and—”
“Wait, wait, what are you trying—”
“Caused by a century of the climatech mods themselves! Too late to reverse it, the climate of the Earth has become a chaotic system, and Lao proves it, Lao is definitive, no more complete simulation is mathematically possible. Causality breaks down entirely past a ten-year time-frame in any iteration!”
Davinda had been making frantically blinking eye contact with her as he gabbled this stuff and the haunted horrified expression on his face was all too human, so this was obviously what was left of the climatologist in there speaking.
But Monique was beyond her technical depth. Implicit in the data? Iterations? Chaotic system? Definitive simulation? Causality breakdown?
This was an image system she just didn’t know enough mathematics to enter. She had to cozen him into translating it into something she could understand. But how?
Well, if there was anything human still inside that brain pan, it was male. And if it was male, the very last bit of humanity it was likely to surrender to the void would be its ego, said essence of maleness being directly circuited to the priapic organ she had firmly in hand.
So . . .
“You’re very proud of your climate model, aren’t you, John Sri Davinda,” she said, pumping him gently but more insistently. “You’re very proud of Lao, it’s such a wonderful climate model, it’s the best there is, it’s—”
“It’s more than a climate model!” Davinda proclaimed. “I am the Tao incarnate in software!”
“It’s what? You’re who?”
Monique moved her hand up behind the very tip of his cock and applied upward pressure, as if to pull him right up out of himself by the handle.
Whether it was the sexual pressure, or her words, or the mix of vapors, or a synergy of all three, Davinda groaned, and began to babble a less technical brand of gibberish.
“Lao is a one-for-one model of the Tao of the Earth in software. Lao can . . . can steer the geosphere. Lao is pure pattern, the Third Force created by the interfacing of mind and matter. Lao is Gaia made manifest. Lao is . . . the Way.”
“Deus ex machismo . . .” Monique groaned.
When she sought to drag what was left of John Sri Davinda back into the land of the living by the phallic ego, she certainly hadn’t expected him to emerge from the cranial void proclaiming he had become a self-created god.
It was admittedly a pretty good trick by most standards.
But extracting the money to do it from the bottom-line capitalist pragmatists of the Big Blue Machine went it one better!
“Surely you didn’t tell the Big Blue Machine that they were funding the birth of the Gaian Godhead of the bits and bytes . . . ?”
“They had no need to know.”
“You mean you had no need for them to know.”
“The software was mathematically definitive. That was verifiable. The partial iterations they ran pleased them very much.”
“Sure, because they came up Condition Venus, didn’t they . . . ? Or you made sure they did. But you needed the human meatware computer to summon up your Lao of the Tao, didn’t you? And they weren’t about to fork over without a guarantee of a human central processing unit, right? So the bastards blackmailed you into it, right?”
“Oh no,” Davinda proclaimed, his eyes glowing with a sickly and unwholesome glory, “I gladly volunteered!”
“You gladly volunteered! To burn your brain out?”
“To become Lao! To become the Steersman of the Planetary Tao!”
Monique dropped Davinda’s prick as if it had suddenly turned into a loathsome slug, which, from a certain perspective, as far as she was concerned, it had.
It was almost enough to make her a Third Force believer.
Whenever two forces oppose, the Third Force emerges?
Oppose Davinda’s definitive climate model with Big Blue’s bottom-line need to sell Condition Venus. Oppose phallic ego and capitalist greed.
And this is what emerges.
You can’t bullshit a bullshitter?
As even the rawest Bread & Circuses recruit speedily learned, it was easy enough if the bullshittees had a strong enough self-interest in allowing themselves to be bullshitted.
But . . .
But the presence of the pistol in the purse beside her reminded Monique that none of this had answered her operational question.
To . . . kill or not to kill, that was the question.
And nothing she had heard thus far had enabled her to evade or resolve it.
“And when they plug your brain back into the computer tomorrow and run . . . the climate model . . . through you?” Monique Calhoun demanded, rather wanly, Eric thought. “What happens then?”
As Eric watched, John Sri Davinda’s blink rate went sky-high, sweat broke out on his face, and, despite the aphrogas, his erection wilted.
“I . . . I . . . I . . . I . . .” he stammered weakly.
And then he abruptly went through yet another eerie transformation. His furious blinking ceased abruptly. He seemed to stop blinking entirely. His stare became fixed. His eyes became as glazed and implacable and inhumanly indifferent as a sleazoid generalissimo’s silvered sunglasses.
And when he spoke again, the voice was firm and flat and devoid of affect, not unlike the default voice of Ignatz behind the interface personality masks.
“I am become Lao,” it said.
Not unlike it at all.
“And that’s what I’m speaking to now, is it?” Monique Calhoun snapped angrily, but with a strangely plaintive catch in her voice. “And what will . . . Lao tell the waiting world about . . . the condition of . . . the Earth’s climatological Tao?”
“Condition Chaos,” said the meatware voice, perfectly emulating a naked software emulation.
Monique Calhoun finally lost it. She threw up her hands in angry frustration. “Fuck Condition Chaos!” she shouted. “I need to know about Condition Venus!”
“All iterations converge on Condition Chaos within a ten-year time-frame.”
“Condition Venus, damn you!” Monique screamed. “I need to know, I mean I really need to know what Lao, what you, whatever, will tell the world about Condition Venus. Real or disney? Yes or no?”
“All iterations converge on Condition Chaos within a ten-year time-frame. No other predictive outcome is mathematically possible.”
> “That’s a no, isn’t it?” Monique Calhoun said in a tiny voice, and began kneading her purse compulsively like a lost little girl’s security blanket.
The interrogation phase of this operation would seem to have dead-ended in failure. Beneath the obscure mathematics and Third Force crypticism, John Sri Davinda, or Lao, or whatever might be said to inhabit that meatware corpus, would certainly seem to at least be saying that this so-called definitive climate model would not verify the impending reality of Condition Venus.
Therefore, according to the contract, Eric must now remove Davinda. He would have to do it with no assurances as to the ultimate planetary consequences, without knowing whether he would be doing the right thing.
That at least would be the fulfillment of a contract he had accepted but others had issued, so he could at least try to persuade himself that the responsibility was collective.
But the responsibility for setting up Monique Calhoun to take the fall for it would be his alone. Because framing Monique for the hit would be a deed done merely to evade his own personal consequences.
And that Eric knew would be wrong.
In that moment he could’ve blown John Sri Davinda away just for confronting him with this entirely unwelcome crisis of the conscience he hadn’t known he had. Or wanted to.
“Any bright ideas, Mom?” Eric snapped angrily.
“Use your noodle, kiddo,” Ignatz told him.
“Brilliant!”
But upon a moment’s less than cool reflection, Eric did.
Or rather, in the time-honored human manner, allowed his emotions to run through his brain, and thence through his mouth:
“All right, Voice, eat Whirlwind!” he commanded.
A mighty white vortex came whipping in off the sea at unreal speed, growing larger and larger as it came, blowing the sea into waves, and the waves into breakers, and the breakers into a foam that broke up into pixels, tearing the serene blue Californian sky into shards, ripping away the verdant veneer of the landscape to reveal the bare rock beneath and the pixelation beneath that, rending the very mountains electronic dust to become the world entire.
Greenhouse Summer Page 32