“Damn.” I sagged onto the bed and told him what Ego had told me.
Django listened with apparent indifference but I had been around him long enough to read the signs. My guess was that WISEGUY was a lot more than “interesting.” Which was why Django wasn’t flashing on some poison or another—he had to be clean for tricky operations. And now if Bonivard was Pfneudl, that lent even more credibility to the idea that WISEGUY was a true AI.
“The old Noodle looked plenty dead to me.” Django shook his head doubtfully. “That was one corpse they had to scoop up with a spoon and bury in a bucket.”
“Video-synthesizers,” I said.
“Sure. But still cheaper to do it for real—and they had reason enough. Look, maybe the pogo was lying. Trying to prove intelligence that way. It’s the old Turing fallacy: fooling another intelligence for an hour means you’re intelligent. Lots of really stupid programs can play these games, Eyes. There’s only one test that means anything: can your AI mix it up with the two billion plus cerebrums on the planet without getting trashed? Drop that pogo into Manhattan and it’ll be scrap by Thursday.”
“Then who is Bonivard?”
Django yawned. “What difference does it make?”
* * *
My door was ajar so that I could hear the spider singing when he came past. “Bonivard!”
The spider nudged into my room, nearly filling it. Still I was able to squeeze by and thumb the printreader on the door, locking us in.
“Don’t worry about Django.” Bonivard seemed amused. “Busy, too busy.”
I didn’t want to look up at him and I wasn’t going to ask him to stoop. I might have stood on the bed except then some part of me would be expecting my father to come in and yell. So instead I clambered to the high window and perched on a rickety wooden balcony that a sneeze might have blown down. The wind off the lake was cool. The rocks beneath me looked like broken teeth.
“Careful,” said Bonivard. “Fall in and you’ll glow.”
“Are you Carl Pfneudl?”
He brought the spider to a dead silent stop. “Where did you hear that name?”
I told him about Ego’s demonstration. What Django had said.
“Are you?” I repeated.
“If I am, the story changes, doesn’t it?” He was being sarcastic but I wasn’t sure whether he was mocking me or himself. “Juicier, as you say. Main menu. It means money. Publicity. Promotions all around. But juice is an expensive commodity.” He sighed. “Make an offer.”
I shook my head. “Not me. I’m not working for Infoline anymore. Probably never work again.” I told him everything: about my burster, the possibility that I had given away our location, how Macmillan had cut me free. I told how I’d tried to tell him before. I don’t know how much of it he knew already—maybe all. But that didn’t stop me: I was on a confessing jag. I told him that Django was making copies of WISEGUY. I even told him that I had dreamed of him. It all spilled out and I let it come. I knew I was supposed to be the reporter, supposed to say nothing, squeeze the juice from him. But nothing was the way it was supposed to be.
When I was done he stared at me with an expression that was totally unreadable. His ruined arm shivered like a dead leaf in the wind. “I wanted to be Carl Pfneudl,” he said. “Once. But Carl Pfneudl is dead. A public execution. Now I’m Bonivard. The prisoner of Chillon.”
“You knew who I was,” I said. “You brought me here. Why?”
Bonivard continued to stare, as if he could barely see me across the room. “Carl Pfneudl was an arrogant bastard. Kind of man who knew he could get anything he wanted. Like Django. If he wanted you, he would have found the way.”
“Django will never get me.” I leaned forward. I felt like grabbing Bonivard, shaking some sense into him. “I’m not some damn hardware you can steal, a program to operate on.”
He nodded. “Maybe that was it. I was alone—too long. Saw you on telelink. You were tough. Took risks but didn’t pretend you weren’t afraid. You were more interesting than the punks you covered. Like Django. Fools like Carl Pfneudl. You were a whole person: nothing missing.”
I took a deep breath. “Can you make love, Bonivard?”
At first he didn’t react. Then the corners of his mouth turned up: a grim smile. “That’s your offer?”
“You want an offer?” I spat on the floor in front of him. “If Pfneudl is dead then good, I’m glad. Now I’m going to ask once more: can you make love to me?”
“A cruel question. A reporter’s question.”
I said nothing.
“I don’t want your damn charity.” As the spider’s cockpit settled to the floor, he stretched to his full pitiful length. “Look at me! I’m a monster. I know what you see.”
I slid off the sill and dropped lightly to the floor. “Maybe a monster is what I want.”
I think I shocked him. I think that some part of him hoped that I would lie, tell him he wasn’t hideous. But that was his problem.
I unbolted him from the spider, picked him up. I’d never carried a lover to bed. He showed me how to disengage the bionic collar; told me we’d have a couple of hours before he would need to be hooked up again.
In some ways it was like my dream. The scar tissue was white, yes. But …
“It’s thermofiber,” he explained. “Packed with sensors.” He could control the shape. Make it expand and contract.
“Connected to all the right places in my brain.”
I kissed his forehead.
I was repulsed. I was fascinated. It was cool to the touch.
“The answer is yes,” he said.
* * *
It was dinner time. Django had made a circle of cherry tomatoes on the table of the banqueting hall.
“It’s over,” said Bonivard.
Django whistled as he walked to the opposite side of the table to line up his shot. He flicked his thumb and his shooter tomato dispersed the top of the circle. “All right.”
Bonivard tossed a Swiss Volksbank passcard across the table, scattering the remainder of Django’s game. “You’re leaving. Take that if you want.”
Django straightened. I wondered if Bonivard realized he was carrying heat. “So I’m leaving.” He picked up the passcard. “Weren’t there two of these before?”
“You made copies of WISEGUY.” Bonivard held up a stack of white memory chips from the cockpit of the spider. “Thanks.”
“Nice bluff.” Some of the stiffness went out of Django. “Except I know my copy procedure was secure.” He smiled. Getting looser. “Even if that is a copy, it’s no good to you. I re-encrypted it, spiderman. Armor-plated code is my specialty. You’ll need computer years to operate.”
“Even so, you’re leaving.” Bonivard was as grim as a cement wall. I think I knew why their negotiations had broken down—had never stood a chance. Bonivard had the same loathing for Django that an addict gets when he looks in the mirror after his morning puke. Django never recognized that hatred; he had the sensitivity of a brick.
“What’s wrong, spiderman? Mindkillers knocking at the door?”
“You’re good,” said Bonivard. “A pity to waste talent like yours. It was a clean escape, Django; they’ve completely lost you. You’ll need some surgery, get yourself a new identity. But that’s no problem.”
“No problem?” I said. “I’m used to being me.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t mind losing this face.” Django rubbed his chin.
“The only reason I put up with you this long,” said Bonivard, “was that I was waiting for WISEGUY.”
“I’m taking my copies, spiderman.”
“You are. And you’re going to move those copies. A lot of them. Cheap and fast. Since they’ve lost your trail, the mindkillers are waiting to see where WISEGUY turns up. Try to backtrack to you. Your play is to bring it out everywhere. Get some pieces of it up on the operators’ net. Overload the search programs and the mindkillers will be too busy to bother you.”
Django was
smiling and nodding like a kid learning from a master. “I like it. Old Django goes out covered with glory. New Django comes in covered with money.”
“Probably headed for the history chips.” Bonivard’s sarcasm was wasted on Django. “The great humanitarian. Savior of the twenty-first century.” Django’s enthusiasm seemed to have wearied Bonivard. “The big prison, punk.”
Django was too full of his own ideas to listen. He shot out of his chair and paced the hall. “A new ID. Hey, Eyes, what do you think of ‘Dizzy.’ I’d use ‘the Count’ but there’s a real count—Liechtenstein or some such—who operates. Maybe Diz. Yeah.”
“Go plug yourself, Django.” I didn’t like any of it; I never signed on to disappear.
“Maybe you’re not as scrambled as you pretend, Frankie boy.” There was open admiration in Django’s voice, “Don’t worry, the secret is safe. Not a word about this dump. Or the Noodle. Honor among thieves, right? No hard feelings.” He had the audacity to extend his hand to Bonivard.
“No feelings at all.” Bonivard recoiled from him. “But you’ll probably get dead before you realize that.”
Anger flashed across Django’s face but it didn’t stick. He shrugged and turned to me. “How about it, Eyes? The sweet smell of money or the stink of mildew?”
“Goodbye, Django.” Bonivard dismissed him with a wave of his good hand.
I didn’t need Bonivard’s help to lose Django. I was almost mad enough to walk out on the two of them. But I didn’t. Maybe it was reporter’s instincts still at work even though they didn’t matter. I gave Django a stare that was cold enough to freeze vodka. Even he could understand that.
He picked up the bank passcard, flicked it with his middle finger. “I told you once, Eyes. You’re not as smart as you think you are.” Flick. “So stay with him and rot, bitch. I don’t need you.” Flick. “I don’t need anyone.”
Which was exactly right.
Bonivard and I sat for a while after he had gone. Not looking at each other. The hall was very quiet. I think he was waiting for me to say something. I didn’t have anything to say.
Finally the spider stretched. “Come to my rooms,” said Bonivard. “Something you should see.”
Bonivard had taken over the suite once reserved for the Dukes of Savoy. It had taken a battering during the riots; in Bonivard’s bedroom a gaping hole in the wall had been closed with glass, affording a view of rubble and the fire-blackened curtain wall. We had to pass through an airlock into a climate-controlled room that he called his workshop. His “workshop” had more computing power than Portugal. The latest Cray filled half the space, a multiprocessor he claimed was capable of performing a trillion operations per second.
“The electronic equivalent of a human brain,” said Bonivard. A transformation came over him as he admired his hardware: a bit of a discarded self showed though. I realized that this was the one place in the castle where the mad prisoner of Chillon was not in complete control. “Runs the spider, although that’s like using a fusion plant to run a toaster. There hasn’t ever been software that could take advantage of this computer’s power.”
“Until WISEGUY,” I said.
For a minute I thought he hadn’t heard me. “Sliced through Django’s encryption in a week.” The spider crouched until the cockpit was almost touching the floor. “WISEGUY is a bundle of different programs that share information. Vision system, planner, parser. Not only can it address massive amounts of memory but it understands what it remembers. Learns from experience.” The spider stopped singing and its legs locked in place. “What’s amazing is that when you port it from one hardware configuration to another, it analyzes the capabilities of the new system and begins using them without any human intervention.” The flatscreen in the cockpit went black: he had powered the spider down. “But it’s not true AI.”
“Not?”
He shook his head. “Heuristics are nowhere near good enough. It’s as close as anyone has ever come but still needs a man in the loop to do anything really worth doing. Bring me the helmet.”
The helmet was a huge bubble of yellow plastic which would completely cover Bonivard’s head. At its base there were cutouts for his shoulders. I peeked inside and saw a pincushion of brain taps. “Careful,” said Bonivard. It was attached by an umbilical to a panel built into the Cray.
I helped him settle the thing on his head and fasten the straps which wrapped under his armpits. I heard a muffled “Thanks.” Then nothing for a few minutes.
The airlock whooshed; I turned. If I were the swooning type, that would have been the time for it. Yellowbaby smiled and held out his arms to me.
I took two joyous strides to him, a tentative step, and then stopped. It wasn’t really the Babe. The newcomer looked like him, all right, enough to be a younger brother or a first cousin—the fact is that I didn’t know what Yellowbably really looked like anyway. The Babe had been to the face cutters so many times that he had a permanent reservation in the OR. He had been a chameleon, chasing the latest style of handsomeness the way some people chase Paris fashion. The newcomer had the same lemon blond hair cut in the same conservatively wide hawk, those Caribbean-blue eyes, the cheekbones of a baronet and the color of cafe au lait. But the neck was too short, the torso too long. It wasn’t Yellowbaby.
The newcomer let his arms fall to his sides. The smile stayed. “Hello, Wynne. I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you.”
“Who are you?”
“Who do you want me to be?” He sauntered across the room to Bonivard, unfastened the helmet, lifted it off, replaced it on its rack next to the Cray. And went stiff as a four-hour-old corpse.
Bonivard blinked in the light. “What do you think?”
“A surrogate? Some fancy kind of remote.”
“Fancy, yes. It can taste, smell. When its sensors touch you, I feel it.”
Telelink had been making noise about the coming of surrogate technology for a long time. Problem was that running the damn things was the hardest work anyone had ever done. Someone claimed it was like trying to play chess in your head while wrestling an alligator. After ten minutes on the apparatus they had to mop most mortals up off the floor.
“How long can you keep it going?” I said.
“Hours. WISEGUY does all the work. All I do is think. And it doesn’t matter if it’s this model or the spider or a robot tank or a killer satellite.”
“The army of the future.” I nodded. “That’s why the feds went berserk.”
“Django is going to be a hero. Everywhere but in the States. The world gets WISEGUY, the balance of power stays the same. And if there’s anyone with any brains left in Washington, they should be secretly pleased. WISEGUY is the kind of weapon you either use or lose. Better to let the imams have it than invade Teheran and risk a nuclear exchange.” He powered the spider up again. “And think of the applications for space and deep sea exploration. Hazardous work environments.”
“Think of the handicapped,” I said bitterly. “I lose my freedom. You get yours. You knew the story would be too hot for Infoline to handle.” I hit myself with the heel of my hand; I’d been so dumb. “You paid Yellow-baby to bring me to you. Like some slimy white slaver.”
“He didn’t know how important WISEGUY was, that Wynne Cage would be stuck here. He didn’t have the specs; I did.” At least Bonivard didn’t try to gloss over his guilt. It wasn’t much but it was something. “You want to leave,” he continued, not daring to look me in the face, “I suppose I don’t blame you. I’ve made the arrangements. And the other bank passcard is already signed over to your new identity.”
“Plug the new ID!” I walked up to the surrogate, felt its hand. The skin was warm to the touch, just moist enough to pass. “What do you need this doll for anyway?”
“The mindkillers let me come here to die. No explanations. They didn’t confiscate my bank accounts. Didn’t stop me from seeing all the doctors I wanted. Just let me go. Probably part of the torture. Keep me wondering. I decided no
t to play it their way, to hurt them even if it landed me back in their lab. But a random hit, no. I wanted to hurt them and help myself at the same time. I did some operating; found out about WISEGUY.”
“Maybe they wanted you to. And IBM let Django steal it.”
“That occurred to me.” Bonivard ran his fingers through his thinning brown hair. “Using me and some punk operators to leak a breakthrough no one really wanted in the first place. War is bad business.” He sighed. “I don’t care anymore. I have WISEGUY. As you say, my freedom. I wanted the surrogate so that I could be with people again. Free from the stares, the pity. The freedom to be normal.”
“But you’re not normal, Bonivard. You are who you are because you’re damaged and you suffer. Living with it is what makes you strong.”
For a moment he seemed stung, as if I had no right to remind him of his deformities. Then the anger faded into sadness. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe this body is part of the prison. But I can’t go on alone anymore. Or I will go mad.” He looked at me then, half a man strapped to a robot spider. “I don’t want you to go, Wynne. I love you.”
I didn’t know what to say to him. He was a genius operator, obscenely rich. The deformities no longer bothered me; in fact, they were part of the attraction. But he had no idea who I was. Making the surrogate look like the Babe had been a sick joke. And he had been so pathetically proud of his thermofiber prosthesis when we’d made love, as if a magic plug was all it took to make an allnighter out of a man with no legs. He didn’t know about my own psychological deformities, less obvious perhaps but no less crippling. How could I stay with him when I’d never stayed anywhere before? The problem was that he was not only in love, he was in need.
“The doctors are quite sure, Wynne. Two years at most—”
“Bonivard!”
“—at most. By that time the leaking of WISEGUY will be old news. It’ll be safe to be Wynne Cage again, anyone you want to be. And of course this will be yours.”
“Stop it, Bonivard. Don’t say anything.” I could tell he had more to say; much too much more. But when he kept quiet, I was mollified. “I thought you didn’t want charity.”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection Page 56