city blues 01 - dome city blues

by Jeff Edwards

  She smiled again. “If it’s as easy as all that, I might just throw it in as a bonus. But if it turns up any surprises, it’s going to cost you.”

  We talked for another half-hour: price, time schedule, data format.

  I elbowed my way out of the bar and caught a hovercab to the eastern perimeter of Dome 12. The cab was a beat-up old Chevy with a patched apron and a wobble in the left rear blower that threatened to loosen my teeth.

  The driver was an attractive African woman, her proud cheekbones decorated with the inverted chevrons of ritual tribal scars. Over her shoulder, I could see the tattletales on the taxi’s liquid crystal instrument panel. Every few seconds, one of the status bars would blink from blue to red. When it did, she would tap the display with her right index finger until it blinked back to blue.

  She dropped me off at the corner of 55th and Fortuna, a couple of blocks short of the barricade. Nobody’s been dumb enough to drive a cab into the Zone in years.

  The MagLev doesn’t run through the Zone anymore either. People kept stealing the superconductor modules out of the track, maybe for the resale value, maybe for the hell of it.

  A few years ago, somebody stole five modules in a row. Ordinarily that wouldn’t have been a big problem; the computers at LA Transit Authority are smart enough to spot damaged track and stop the train. Unfortunately, the thief managed to bypass the track sensors and trick the LA-Trans computers into thinking the track was safe. A Lev derailed, killing twenty-nine people and wiping out a half dozen buildings.

  Now, unless you actually have your own car, the only way in or out of the Zone is on foot.

  The cops at the barricade let me through with a quick wave of their scanner and a token pat down. It was a formality. They don’t much care who or what goes into the Zone. They’re worried about what gets out.

  The Fearless Leaders of our fair city like to keep most of their bad eggs in one basket. Don’t get me wrong, they have crime in the other domes too, but not like we’ve got it in good old Urban Environmental Enclosure 12-A.

  I should have moved ages ago. Just stubborn I guess.

  When I got home, I laid down on the couch with my eyes closed and told House to play some blues. House responded with Blind Willie Johnson’s Lord, I Just Can’t Keep From Cryin’. I tried to lose myself in the music, but even Blind Willie’s gently gruff voice and sensuous slide guitar couldn’t distract my racing brain.

  After a few minutes, I stood up and lit a cigarette. I couldn’t even pretend to relax.

  I kept telling myself that there was nothing to get keyed-up about. I didn’t have to take the case. I hadn’t promised Sonja anything.

  No, that wasn’t true. I had promised to give her case serious consideration. But I was doing that, wasn’t I? Hadn’t I hired Jackal to scope the police files on the case? When I got access to those files, I would go over them in detail and prove to myself what I already knew: that Michael Winter was guilty.

  I would be off the hook. I could stay snuggled up in my little cocoon, listen to ancient blues, drink scotch, smoke bootleg cigarettes, and weld pieces of metal together in patterns that amused my simple mind. I could tell Ms. Sonja Winter that her late unlamented brother was a murderous psycho-pervert, who deserved to have his brains blown out.

  Except...

  I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to tell Sonja that her brother was a killer. I didn’t want to tell her that she was going to spend the next fifteen years as a corporate sex-toy.

  Maybe a lot of people wouldn’t appreciate the difference that would make in her life. She was a whore, right? So what if she had to punch a time clock for somebody else instead of set her own hours? She still made her living flat on her back, right?

  The difference was in control. As an independent call girl, Sonja could select her clientele. She could take a day off if she wanted. She could say no.

  It was the difference between freedom and slavery.

  Still, none of that was my problem. I had troubles of my own. I didn’t need to shoulder someone else’s burden.

  I jump-started a second cigarette off the butt of the first and then ground out the butt in an ashtray.

  I wanted a drink. There was a bottle of Cutty hidden somewhere in one of the kitchen cabinets. I went looking for it.

  On the counter next to the refrigerator was Ms. Winter’s little stack of pictures.

  I picked them up. The picture on top was a dog-eared photograph of Michael Winter as a boy, twelve, maybe thirteen. He was skinny, his hair a much brighter red than it had been in the video. On his left hand, he wore a baseball glove; a bat was draped across his right shoulder.

  I paged through the stack slowly. A trid of a high school graduation, Michael and two other grinning teens in caps and gowns. Michael in his early twenties, sprawled on a couch with a huge tabby cat sleeping on his chest. The shot had probably been taken a year or two before North America had been hit by the genetic plague that made cats an endangered species.

  I flipped to the next picture, another flat photo, Michael at four or five, in a bathtub full of bubbles. An obviously staged trid of an adult Michael surrounded by electronic equipment and wrapped in a tangle of test sensors and wires.

  The last trid in the stack caught my attention. Michael as an adult, his arm around the shoulders of a pretty young woman dressed in orange surgical scrubs. The woman carried a data pad and had a stethoscope strung around her neck; she was obviously a doctor or nurse. It took me a couple of seconds to recognize the woman as Sonja Winter; the holo had been shot before she’d gotten the eye shadow and lipstick tattoos.

  I wondered if the surgical getup was a Halloween costume. If so, why wasn’t Michael in costume as well?

  I dropped the pictures on the counter and opened the door to a cabinet. The Cutty was around somewhere. I closed the cabinet and opened another.

  As I reached up to rummage through the shelves, I realized that my hand was trembling.

  Maybe a drink wasn’t such a good idea. I closed the cabinet and went to bed.

  I had the dream again...

  I am in a dark labyrinth of rusty steel walls and worn cement floors. The tops of the walls and ceiling are lost in shadow. Somewhere, I can hear water drip slowly into a stagnant pool. The air is damp and has a weird echoing quality that makes me think of indoor swimming pools. The darkness is interrupted by irregular patches of light.

  I hear a series of muffled thumps. Someone is pounding on a wall. I don’t know how I know it, but I’m certain that it’s Maggie. She’s in some sort of danger. I have to find her! I listen carefully to the pounding, trying to figure out where it’s coming from. I can’t tell. I touch first one wall, then another. It’s no good; I can feel the vibration through all the walls.

  The pounding becomes faster, more urgent.

  I start to run through the maze, taking turns at random. I’ve got to find her! I will goddamn it, I will!

  I run faster, my feet skidding through puddles of water, stumbling over unseen debris. Sometimes I lose my balance and bounce a shoulder painfully off one of the walls or sprawl headlong on the floor. When that happens, I scramble to my feet and take off again, rushing blindly on through the labyrinth.

  The pounding grows weaker, less frequent.

  Every time I turn a corner, I promise myself that Maggie is just around the next one. At each new corner, the promise turns into a lie.

  The pounding is very weak now. I have to stop running to hear it over my own footsteps. She hasn’t got much time left. Oh God, don’t do this to me... PLEASE God... I’ll do anything...

  I found myself sitting up in bed whispering “Please God...” over and over as the tears streamed down my face.

  I knew better than to try to stop it. I just let it out in great wracking sobs that left me gasping like a fish on dry land.

  When it was over, I felt wrung out. I laid down and listened to the sound of my own breathing until I drifted off again. If I dreamed, it wasn’t an
ything worth remembering.

  The next morning, I was in the shower when House played that pleasant little chime he uses to get my attention. I paused in mid-scrub. “Yeah House, what have you got?”

  “As you requested, David, I have downloaded the morning news feed.”

  I resumed scrubbing. “Great, check the Personals for any messages addressed to Igor.”

  The Igor thing was Jackal’s idea. I guess jackers have an obsession for code names.

  “There is one message addressed to Igor,” House said. “Shall I read it to you?”

  “Please.”

  House made a quiet throat clearing sound. It was an obviously superfluous gesture, since he didn’t actually have a throat. I guess something in his programming told him that it was an appropriate sound to make, prior to reading aloud. “To Igor, From J — The job is done. Come see me.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks, House.”

  “Don’t mention it, David.”

  Nine hours later, I walked to Dome 12 and caught the Lev to West Hollywood.

  Nexus Dreams was every bit as crowded as it had been the night before. One end of the room had been cordoned off into a makeshift stage. The attraction was a computer performance artist who billed himself as “Insanity.” The performer’s long black hair was slicked back and pulled into a point, giving his head a sort of teardrop shape.

  He wore a white synthleather trench coat that hung to his knees. His entire act appeared to consist of a table top full of computer equipment jacked into a hologram projector. The rig generated an animated hologram of the artist’s own face. The holo was enlarged to about five times its normal size, so it could be easily seen from all over the room. It floated over the heads of the crowd, its features contorting themselves through a range of weird expressions as it alternately screamed and whispered bizarre epithets.

  “Night is the contrivance of solidified truth!” it shouted. “I am the crystal blood-mist of hyperbolic fuel that mummifies the secret organs of the gods...”

  The holographic face ranted ceaselessly, never making an iota of sense.

  I watched the thing whimper and rave. At first, I thought it was just a simulation, a vid recording of the artist’s face that had been doctored by video morphing software to create bizarre facial expressions. But I began to realize that it was more than that. There was something hypnotic about it, as though the hologram were a living thing instead of a weirdly distorted digital recording.

  Somehow, from across the crowded bar, the hologram’s gaze met mine. I found myself staring into its eyes, and I saw an agony reflected there that nearly staggered me.

  “I can’t stop them,” the hologram said. “Leaves of corruption are falling on my face, burrowing their way like insects down into the empty chasm of my heart, and I CAN... NOT... STOP... THEM...”

  It suddenly seemed possible that I might stand there forever, crucified by the power of the holo’s gaze. Then the tortured eyes flicked away from me, and began wandering the room again. The spell of pain was broken.

  I tore my eyes away and stared at the floor. It took me a couple of seconds to remember why I’d come here. Finally, I lifted my head and started scanning the crowd for Jackal.

  I found her sitting at a table at the end of the room opposite Insanity. Seated next to her was a kid I’d never seen before. He was augmented cybernetically, heavily augmented. Enough of him was hidden behind hardware implants to make it difficult to read his age, but my best guess was about seventeen. He was definitely too young for the bar scene, but no one seemed to be interested in scanning his ID-chip.

  Where the kid’s eyes should have been, cylindrical electroptic lenses protruded from his eye sockets like the barrels of twin video cameras. His camera eyes whirred softly as the lenses spun to bring me into focus. His right hand looked normal, but his left was cybernetic, an articulated alloy skeleton that made me think of robotic bones. His head was shaved, his scalp tattooed with intricate patterns of circuit runs. The servomotors in his cybernetic hand emitted sporadic electro-mechanical whimpers whenever he moved his fingers. He stared at me for a second and then shifted his electroptic eyes back to Insanity’s performance art.

  I turned to Jackal. If anything, she looked thinner than she had the night before. In place of the jump suit, she wore blue stretch-pants and a white sweatshirt with the sleeves ripped off. The front of the shirt was a photo-active trid depicting a famous cartoon mouse sodomizing his cutesy mouse girlfriend in lurid 3-D. The mouse appeared to move in and out when Jackal turned her body.

  Jackal motioned me to a seat.

  I sat down without ordering. I didn’t intend to be there very long.

  Jackal started to say something, but Cyber-kid interrupted her. “They think that shit is funny,” he said.

  His voice was gravelly, obviously generated by a speech synthesis chip. I was struck by the certainty that he’d had his own larynx removed, just so he could speak with the voice of a machine.

  “They’re too stupid to know what they’re doing,” he said. “Either that, or they’re too stupid to care.”

  Jackal took a swallow of her bright green drink. “It’s no big deal,” she said.

  “That asshole is torturing it,” the kid said in his metallic voice. His camera-eyes were locked on the performance artist’s floating hologram. “And everybody thinks it’s funny.”

  I forced myself to look down the length of the bar room at the hologram, ready to jerk my eyes away the instant I felt the touch of its electric gaze. From this distance, the face’s jabbering voice was hard to hear over the murmurings of the customers.

  “It’s like it’s alive,” I said. “At first, I thought it was just a vid recording, but it’s more than that, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a Scion,” Jackal said.

  “A Turing Scion?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” the kid said. “A digital image of a human mind. And Asshole over there is driving it crazy, on purpose.”

  I knew a little something about Turing Scions. The concept had been around since the nineteen forties, the brainchild of Alan Turing, the British mathematician who’d invented digital computer logic, Artificial Intelligence, and the so-called Machine Mind.

  Turing had predicted that technology would eventually permit a human mind to be recorded in digital form. Thought, personality, idiosyncrasies, prejudices, the whole ball of wax. Turing had been right; technology had caught up with his ideas in less than a hundred years.

  “How can you drive a Turing Scion crazy?” I asked.

  The kid turned his electroptic eyes toward me. “Leave it plugged in,” he said.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Turing Scions are supposed to be plugged in. That’s what they’re designed for.”

  “True,” Jackal said, “but they’re only intended to be active for short periods of time. If you leave one plugged in too long, it goes crazy.”

  “I still don’t understand,” I said.

  “Look,” the kid said. “The entire point behind the Turing Scion is to preserve the knowledge base of our so-called civilization. In the past, if a brilliant engineer died, his knowledge and his creativity died with him. His thought patterns, his ideas, his personal methods of problem solving … everything. All gone forever. That’s the way things worked for most of human history. Then, along comes the Turing Scion and changes all the rules. Now, if our hypothetical engineer has a Turing Scion, his knowledge doesn’t disappear when he dies. If we have a problem that only Mr. Hypothetical Engineer can solve, we just plug his Scion into a computer node and start asking questions.”

  “But you can’t leave it plugged in,” Jackal said.

  “Why not?”

  The kid stared at me like I was an idiot. “Scions are sort of like software,” he said. “They’re only active when you plug them into a computer node. Unplug one, and it’s just an anodized box full of dense-pack memory chips. It can’t talk. It
can’t think. It can’t do anything. It’s inert. Asleep, if you prefer.”

  “But when they are plugged in,” Jackal said, “they have dynamic memory, just like AI’s. They continue to think, and learn, and grow.”

  “How does that make them go crazy?” I asked.

  “Think about it,” the kid said. “Even a low-end computer can process information three or four hundred times faster than a human brain can. For every hour of real-time that passes, an active Scion would experience four hundred hours. That’s about sixteen days. Not sixteen days for some piece of artificially intelligent machine code that only thinks it’s alive. Sixteen days for a human mind who has memories, wants, aspirations.”

  I nodded.

  The kid looked back toward the performance artist’s Turing Scion. “Asshole over there has kept his Scion plugged in for over a year. Try to imagine that. Four hundred years trapped inside a machine.”

  “It’s not like it’s a real person,” Jackal said.

  “It thinks it’s a real person,” the kid said.

  I looked across the bar at the anguished face of the Scion, and suddenly I couldn’t bear the thought of being in the same room with it. I cleared my throat. “This is all very interesting,” I said, “but I have business to attend to.” I looked at Jackal.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I got a little sidetracked.” She pulled a data chip out of her pocket and slid it across the transparent table top.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out an envelope. “Cash,” I said. “As agreed.”

  We traded.

  I wouldn’t be able to verify the contents of the chip until I got home. Jackal knew this; out of courtesy, she didn’t open the envelope until I was gone.

  Outside the bar, I waited for a cab on Santa Monica Boulevard, and tried not to think about Turing Scions. I’d seen one years before, and I hadn’t liked it anymore than I’d liked the one inside Nexus Dreams.

  John had talked Maggie into letting him make the recording. She’d been excited by the idea: her mind, her personality stored in a digital module. All you had to do was plug the Scion into a computer and presto, Maggie in a can. Sort of the electronic version of immortality.