The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  Now Krishna actually set his peecee aside. He spoke with uncharacteristic fire. “Gunther, we need this information. Do you realize that we are trying to run a technological civilization with a brain that was evolved in the neolithic? I am perfectly serious. We’re all trapped in the old hunter-gatherer programs, and they are of no use to us anymore. Take a look at what’s happening on Earth. They’re hip-deep in a war that nobody meant to start and nobody wants to fight and it’s even money that nobody can stop. The type of thinking that put us in this corner is not to our benefit. It has to change. And that’s what we are working toward—taming the human brain. Harnessing it. Reining it in.

  “Granted, our research has been turned against us. But what’s one more weapon among so many? If neuroprogrammers hadn’t been available, something else would have been used. Mustard gas maybe, or plutonium dust. For that matter, they could’ve just blown a hole in the canopy and let us all strangle.”

  “That’s self-justifying bullshit, Krishna! Nothing can excuse what you’ve done.”

  Quietly, but with conviction, Krishna said, “You will never convince me that our research is not the most important work we could possibly be doing today. We must seize control of this monster within our skulls. We must change our ways of thinking.” His voice dropped. “The sad thing is that we cannot change unless we survive. But in order to survive, we must first change.”

  They worked in silence after that.

  ***

  Gunther awoke from restless dreams to find that the sleep shift was only half over. Liza was snoring. Careful not to wake her, he pulled his clothes on and padded barefoot out of his niche and down the hall. The light was on in the common room and he heard voices.

  Ekatarina looked up when he entered. Her face was pale and drawn. Faint circles had formed under her eyes. She was alone.

  “Oh, hi. I was just talking with the CMP.” She thought off her peecee. “Have a seat.”

  He pulled up a chair and hunched down over the table. Confronted by her, he found it took a slight but noticeable effort to draw his breath. “So. How are things going?”

  “They’ll be trying out your controllers soon. The first batch of chips ought to be coming out of the factories in an hour or so. I thought I’d stay up to see how they work out.”

  “It’s that bad, then?” Ekatarina shook her head, would not look at him. “Hey, come on, here you are waiting up on the results, and I can see how tired you are. There must be a lot riding on this thing.”

  “More than you know,” she said bleakly. “I’ve just been going over the numbers. Things are worse than you can imagine.”

  He reached out and took her cold, bloodless hand. She squeezed him so tightly it hurt. Their eyes met and he saw in hers all the fear and wonder he felt.

  Wordlessly, they stood.

  “I’m niching alone,” Ekatarina said. She had not let go of his hand, held it so tightly in fact, that it seemed she would never let it go.

  Gunther let her lead him away.

  ***

  They made love, and talked quietly about inconsequential things, and made love again. Gunther had thought she would nod off immediately after the first time, but she was too full of nervous energy for that.

  “Tell me when you’re about to come,” she murmured. “Tell me when you’re coming.”

  He stopped moving. “Why do you always say that?”

  Ekatarina looked up at him dazedly, and he repeated the question. Then she laughed a deep, throaty laugh. “Because I’m frigid.”

  “Hah?”

  She took his hand, and brushed her cheek against it. Then she ducked her head, continuing the motion across her neck and up the side of her scalp. He felt the short, prickly hair against his palm and then, behind her ear, two bumps under the skin where biochips had been implanted. One of those would be her trance chip and the other…“It’s a prosthetic,” she explained. Her eyes were grey and solemn. “It hooks into the pleasure centers. When I need to, I can turn on my orgasm at a thought. That way we can always come at the same time.” She moved her hips slowly beneath him as she spoke.

  “But that means you don’t really need to have any kind of sexual stimulation at all, do you? You can trigger an orgasm at will. While you’re riding on a bus. Or behind a desk. You could just turn that thing on and come for hours at a time.”

  She looked amused. “I’ll tell you a secret. When it was new, I used to do stunts like that. Everybody does. One outgrows that sort of thing quickly.”

  With more than a touch of stung pride, Gunther said, “Then what am I doing here? If you’ve got that thing, what the hell do you need me for?” He started to draw away from her.

  She pulled him down atop her again. “You’re kind of comforting,” she said. “In an argumentative way. Come here.”

  ***

  He got back to his futon and began gathering up the pieces of his suit. Liza sat up sleepily and gawked at him. “So,” she said. “It’s like that, is it?”

  “Yeah, well. I kind of left something unfinished. An old relationship.” Warily, he extended a hand. “No hard feelings, huh?”

  Ignoring his hand, she stood, naked and angry. “You got the nerve to stand there without even wiping my smile off your dick first and say no hard feelings? Asshole!”

  “Aw, come on now, Liza, it’s not like that.”

  “Like hell it’s not! You got a shot at that white-assed Russian ice queen, and I’m history. Don’t think I don’t know all about her.”

  “I was hoping we could still be, you know, friends.”

  “Nice trick, shithead.” She balled her fist and hit him hard in the center of his chest. Tears began to form in her eyes. “You just slink away. I’m tired of looking at you.”

  He left.

  ***

  But did not sleep. Ekatarina was awake and ebullient over the first reports coming in of the new controller system. “They’re working!” she cried. “They’re working!” She’d pulled on a silk camisole, and strode back and forth excitedly, naked to the waist. Her pubic hair was a white flame, with almost invisible trails of smaller hairs reaching for her navel and caressing the sweet insides of her thighs. Tired as he was, Gunther felt new desire for her. In a weary, washed-out way, he was happy.

  “Whooh!” She kissed him hard, not sexually, and called up the CMP. “Rerun all our earlier projections. We’re putting our afflicted components back to work. Adjust all work schedules.”

  “As you direct.”

  “How does this change our long-range prospects?”-

  The program was silent for several seconds, processing. Then it said, “You are about to enter a necessary but very dangerous stage of recovery. You are going from a low-prospects high-stability situation to a high-prospects high-instability one. With leisure your unafflicted components will quickly grow dissatisfied with your government.”

  “What happens if I just step down?”

  “Prospects worsen drastically.”

  Ekatarina ducked her head. “All right, what’s likely to be our most pressing new problem?”

  “The unafflicted components will demand to know more about the war on Earth. They’ll want the media feeds restored immediately.”

  “I could rig up a receiver easily enough,” Gunther volunteered. “Nothing fancy, but…”

  “Don’t you dare!”

  “Hah? Why not?”

  “Gunther, let me put it to you this way: What two nationalities are most heavily represented here?”

  “Well, I guess that would be Russia and—oh.”

  “Oh is right. For the time being, I think it’s best if nobody knows for sure who’s supposed to be enemies with whom.” She asked the CMP, “How should I respond?”

  “Until the situation stabilizes, you have no choice but distraction. Keep their minds occupied. Hunt down the saboteurs and then organize war crime trials.”

  “That’s out. No witch hunts, no scapegoats, no trials. We’re all in this together.�
��

  Emotionlessly, the CMP said, “Violence is the left hand of government. You are rash to dismiss its potentials without serious thought.”

  “I won’t discuss it.”

  “Very well. If you wish to postpone the use of force for the present, you could hold a hunt for the weapon used on Bootstrap. Locating and identifying it would involve everyone’s energies without necessarily implicating anybody. It would also be widely interpreted as meaning an eventual cure was possible, thus boosting the general morale without your actually lying.”

  Tiredly, as if this were something she had gone over many times already, she said, “Is there really no hope of curing them?”

  “Anything is possible. In light of present resources, though, it cannot be considered likely.”

  Ekatarina thought the peecee off, dismissing the CMP. She sighed. “Maybe that’s what we ought to do. Donkey up a hunt for the weapon. We ought to be able to do something with that notion.”

  Puzzled, Gunther said, “But it was one of Chang’s weapons, wasn’t it? A schizomimetic engine, right?”

  “Where did you hear that?” she demanded sharply.

  “Well, Krishna said…He didn’t act like…I thought it was public knowledge.”

  Ekatarina’s face hardened. “Program!” she thought.

  The CMP came back to life. “Ready.”

  “Locate Krishna Narasimhan, unafflicted, Cadre Five. I want to speak with him immediately.” Ekatarina snatched up her panties and shorts, and furiously began dressing. “Where are my damned sandals? Program! Tell him to meet me in the common room. Right away.”

  “Received.”

  ***

  To Gunther’s surprise, it took over an hour for Ekatarina to browbeat Krishna into submission. Finally, though, the young research component went to a lockbox, identified himself to it, and unsealed the storage areas. “It’s not all that secure,” he said apologetically. “If our sponsors knew how often we just left everything open so we could get in and out, they’d—well, never mind.”

  He lifted a flat, palm-sized metal rectangle from a cabinet. “This is the most likely means of delivery. It’s an aerosol bomb. The biological agents are loaded here, and it’s triggered by snapping this back here. It’s got enough pressure in it to spew the agents fifty feet straight up. Air currents do the rest.” He tossed it to Gunther who stared down at the thing in horror. “Don’t worry, it’s not armed.”

  He slid out a slim drawer holding row upon gleaming row of slim chrome cylinders. “These contain the engines themselves. They’re off-the-shelf nanoweaponry. State of the art stuff, I guess.” He ran a fingertip over them. “We’ve programmed each to produce a different mix of neurotransmitters. Dopamine, phencylclidine, norepinephrine, acetylcholine, met-enkephalin, substance P, serotonin—there’s a hefty slice of Heaven in here, and—” he tapped an empty space—”right here is our missing bit of Hell.” He frowned, and muttered, “That’s curious. Why are there two cylinders missing?”

  “What’s that?” Ekatarina said. “I didn’t catch what you just said.”

  “Oh, nothing important. Um, listen, it might help if I yanked a few biological pathways charts and showed you the chemical underpinnings of these things.”

  “Never mind that. Just keep it sweet and simple. Tell us about these schizomimetic engines.”

  It took over an hour to explain.

  The engines were molecule-sized chemical factories, much like theassemblers in a microfactory. They had been provided by the military, in the hope Chang’s group would come up with a misting weapon that could be sprayed in an army’s path to cause them to change their loyalty. Gunther dozed off briefly while Krishna was explaining why that was impossible, and woke up sometime after the tiny engines had made their way into the brain.

  “It’s really a false schizophrenia,” Krishna explained. “True schizophrenia is a beautifully complicated mechanism. What these engines create is more like a bargain-basement knockoff. They seize control of the brain chemistry, and start pumping out dopamine and a few other neuromediators. It’s not an actual disorder, per se. They just keep the brain hopping.” He coughed. “You see.”

  “Okay,” Ekatarina said. “Okay. You say you can reprogram these things. How?”

  “We use what are technically called messenger engines. They’re like neuromodulators—they tell the schizomimetic engines what to do.” He slid open another drawer, and in a flat voice said, “They’re gone.”

  “Let’s keep to the topic, if we may. We’ll worry about your inventory later. Tell us about these messenger engines. Can you brew up a lot of them, to tell the schizomimetics to turn themselves off?”

  “No, for two reasons. First, these molecules were hand-crafted in the Swiss Orbitals; we don’t have the industrial plant to create them. Secondly, you can’t tell the schizomimetics to turn themselves off. They don’t have off switches. They’re more like catalysts than actual machines. You can reconfigure them to produce different chemicals, but…” He stopped, and a distant look came into his eyes. “Damn.” He grabbed up his peecee, and a chemical pathways chart appeared on one wall. Then beside it, a listing of major neurofunctions. Then another chart covered with scrawled behavioral symbols. More and more data slammed up on the wall.

  “Uh, Krishna…?”

  “Oh, go away,” he snapped. “This is important.”

  “You think you might be able to come up with a cure?”

  “Cure? No. Something better. Much better.”

  Ekatarina and Gunther looked at each other. Then she said, “Do you need anything? Can I assign anyone to help you?”

  “I need the messenger engines. Find them for me.”

  “How? How do we find them? Where do we look?”

  “Sally Chang,” Krishna said impatiently. “She must have them. Nobody else had access.” He snatched up a light pen, and began scrawling crabbed formulae on the wall.

  “I’ll get her for you. Program! Tell—”

  “Chang’s a flick,” Gunther reminded her. “She was caught by the aerosol bomb.” Which she must surely have set herself. A neat way of disposing of evidence that might’ve led to whatever government was running her. She’d have been the first to go mad.

  Ekatarina pinched her nose, wincing. “I’ve been awake too long,” she said. “All right, I understand. Krishna, from now on you’re assigned permanently to research. The CMP will notify your cadre leader. Let me know if you need any support. Find me a way to turn this damned weapon off.” Ignoring the way he shrugged her off, she said to Gunther, “I’m yanking you from Cadre Four. From now on, you report directly to me. I want you to find Chang. Find her, and find those messenger engines.”

  Gunther was bone-weary. He couldn’t remember when he’d last had a good eight hours’ sleep. But he managed what he hoped was a confident grin. “Received.”

  ***

  A madwoman should not have been able to hide herself. Sally Chang could. Nobody should have been able to evade the CMP’s notice, now that it was hooked into a growing number of afflicted individuals. Sally Chang did. The CMP informed Gunther that none of the flicks were aware of Chang’s whereabouts. It accepted a directive to have them all glance about for her once every hour until she was found.

  In the west tunnels, walls had been torn out to create a space as large as any factory interior. The remotes had been returned, and were now manned by almost two hundred flicks spaced so that they did not impinge upon each other’s fields of instruction. Gunther walked by them, through the CMP’s whispering voices: “Are all bulldozers accounted for? If so…Clear away any malfunctioning machines; they can be placed…for vacuum-welded dust on the upper surfaces of the rails…reduction temperature, then look to see that the oxygen feed is compatible…” At the far end a single suit sat in a chair, overseer unit in its lap.

  “How’s it going?” Gunther asked.

  “Absolutely top-notch.” He recognized Takayuni’s voice. “Most of the factories are up an
d running, and we’re well on our way to having the railguns operative too. You wouldn’t believe the kind of efficiencies we’re getting here.”

  “Good, huh?”

  Takayuni grinned; Gunther could hear it in his voice. “Industrious little buggers!”

  Takayuni hadn’t seen Chang. Gunther moved on.

  Some hours later he found himself sitting wearily in Noguchi park, looking at the torn-up dirt where the kneehigh forest had been. Not a seedling had been spared; the silver birch was extinct as a lunar species. Dead carp floated belly-up in the oil-slicked central lake; a chain-link fence circled it now, to keep out the flicks. There hadn’t been the time yet to begin cleaning up the litter, and when he looked about, he saw trash everywhere. It was sad. It reminded him of Earth.

  He knew it was time to get going, but he couldn’t. His head sagged, touched his chest, and jerked up. Time had passed.

  A flicker of motion made him turn. Somebody in a pastel lavender boutique suit hurried by. The woman who had directed him to the city controller’s office the other day. “Hello!” he called. “I found everybody just where you said. Thanks. I was starting to get a little spooked.”

  The lavender suit turned to look at him. Sunlight glinted on black glass. A still, long minute later, she said, “Don’t mention it,” and started away.

  “I’m looking for Sally Chang. Do you know her? Have you seen her? She’s a flick, kind of a little woman, flamboyant, used to favor bright clothes, electric makeup, that sort of thing.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you.” Lavender was carrying three oxytanks in her arms. “You might try the straw market, though. Lots of bright clothes there.” She ducked into a tunnel opening and disappeared within.

  Gunther stared after her distractedly, then shook his head. He felt so very, very tired.

  ***

  The straw market looked as though it had been through a storm. The tents had been torn down, the stands knocked over, the goods looted. Shards of orange and green glass crunched underfoot. Yet a rack of Italian scarfs worth a year’s salary stood untouched amid the rubble. It made no sense at all.