Noir

by K. W. Jeter

  “But I know,” the cube bunny said softly. “That you don’t. See right. I can tell.”

  McNihil wasn’t surprised by that, either. That was what cube bunnies were good at. It wasn’t their major job skill-their skin and flesh was that-but it was a major adjunct, anyway. The ability to tell things about people, to figure out in some deep nonverbal way what the score was. And how to profit thereby.

  Girls like her confounded the corporations. That’s what they’d evolved to do. The whole point of cube life, the logical extension of the system of shuffling employees in and out of workplace cubicles at random, had been revealed back at the millennium turn to be psychological warfare on the corporations’ own. What the human-resource managers and company psychs called optimized transience disorientation. It was all straight out of Henry Denkmann’s magnum opus, Connect ’Em Till They Bleed: Pimp-Style Management™ for a New Century, which hadn’t so much revolutionized corporate life as confirmed and blessed what had already been going on. This particular theory being an extension of the old New Orleans whore-hustling motto, that they weren’t completely under your control if they still thought they had names of their own: if employees didn’t have a place to call their own all during the day-if they didn’t scent-mark familiar walls and desks with their family photos and funny plastic figures stuck on top of their computer monitors-then it was that much easier to ream out their heads and stick in whatever behavior patterns the human-resource departments wanted. The only problem being that the employees still went home, to the same home over and over, defeating all the psychs’ good work, keeping bad attitudes high, as indicated in the standard measurements of workplace sabotage, absenteeism and pay agitation, and theft of office supplies. The cubapts solved all that, or at least most of it.

  Better a freelancer, McNihil had decided a long time ago. The Collection Agency might’ve wound up connecting him over as well, but it’d at least left most of the contents of his head intact. Shabby as this place was-and he’d had better, back when the agency gigs had been lining his pockets-at least he’d never had to shuffle every evening from one company-assigned anonymous living-space to another, with his clothes and a little box of irreducible personal belongings packed and waiting for him when he got home to the next one. That’d be a stone drag, even at the relatively luxurious levels that an up-and-coming junior exec got shuffled in and out of. The corpse, which McNihil had looked at a little while ago, had been like that. The poor bastard had died on the company farm.

  “You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?” The cube bunny was still looking intently into McNihil’s eyes. “I can tell that, too.”

  “Yeah, I suppose you can.” The little ways that cube bunnies and others in their low-rent quadrant of the sexual-services industry had. Which drove the corporations’ psychs up the wall. How could you reduce your company’s employees to perfect productive zeroes, with no hindering attachments to things or places, if cube bunnies and the like kept showing up at their doors, or even worse, inside their cubapts, sailing right past all the locks and security devices? And the same cube bunny, or the gender-preferenced equivalent, for each employee. When that goes on, the erosion of nonproductive personality structures-the human-resources goal that management had taken over from the previous century’s old-line drug-rehab programs-and all the other good things that come from a randomized living environment, all that gets kicked out on the street. Or some of it, at least.

  The cube bunny smiled at him. “I’m good at what I do.”

  “You must be.” There had been a hint in the girl’s voice, about her other job skills. He decided to let that pass for the time being. “You know,” said McNihil, “I see you just fine. I see you the way I’d rather.”

  She tilted her head to one side, studying him. “You had that operation, didn’t you?”

  “I’ve had several.” McNihil shrugged. “I’ve led a rough life. Or maybe just an unlucky one.”

  “No, silly; you know what I mean. That operation. That thing…” The cube bunny hesitated, then pointed to her own face. “With the eyes and stuff. Where they cut ’em open and… put things in ’em.”

  “‘Things?’”

  “Things you see.”

  “Well, sweetheart…” McNihil took another draw on the brackish liquid in the cup. “That’s what they do, all right. They stuff whole worlds in there.” He returned a fragment of the smile she’d given him. “They even put you in there.”

  The rest of the smile had faded away. “I don’t understand.” She drew back apprehensively. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Mr. Travelt didn’t have anything like that.”

  “That’s because…” McNihil set his cup down on the table. “He was a smarter man than I am. Though it doesn’t seem to have done him much good.”

  She didn’t seem to hear the last comment. “Why would you do something like that?” An appalled fascination narrowed her gaze. “Let them do that to you?”

  “‘Let them?’” McNihil laughed. “Shit, I paid for it. Didn’t come cheap, either. It was a while back, when I was doing rather better than I am now.” He gestured toward the shabby apartment encasing them. “I could afford to be in at the beginning of a product-introduction cycle.”

  “What happened?”

  “I came down in the world.” In this one and the other, he thought but didn’t say aloud.

  “No,” said the cube bunny, “I mean with the operation. And your eyes. It must’ve gone wrong, huh? I heard they do that. And then you’re… you know… not right.”

  “If I am-” One finger tapped the side of the cup in front of McNihil. “It’s not because of my eyes.” He picked the ersatz coffee up and drank. “Besides,” he said, leaning back, “what do you know about it? I wouldn’t have thought there were things like that back in Kansas.”

  “There ain’t shit in Kansas.” A little cloud of unsunned memory passed across the cube bunny’s face.

  “That’s where you’re from? I was just guessing.” McNihil felt sorry for her. On the other side of the reality line, in that world he’d glimpsed in the wet reflection of the chrome percolator, she had all that other world’s pretty genetics, a child’s face grafted by survival-oriented evolution onto an adult’s body, one that hadn’t needed to be surgically pumped up to achieve its Blakean lineaments of desire. Born that way, thought McNihil. They came out of the rusting wastelands at the center of the continent, boys and girls together, walking the dead roads of Kansas and Ohio all the way to the Pacific Rim cities, True Los Angeles and all around the Gloss to Vladivostok and the Chinese and Southeast Asian zones. Where they had something to sell: themselves and their sheer prettiness, the exact combinations of size of eye, distance between, angle of nose and space to the perfect upper lip. The infantile kink, the baby-sex lure, was seemingly programmed right into the human nervous system. It lodged right down at the base of the spine, where some kundalinic serpent with icy pederast gaze uncoiled and went either wet or stiff at the sight of its prey. Even in his own, he had to admit. Before the vision had faded on the side of the coffeepot, a needle-eyed weasel had smiled at the center of his brain.

  Maybe that’s why, thought McNihil. I’d rather see her this way. Safer emotionally, no matter whatever else might happen. He was still a married man, even though his wife was technically dead.

  “Mr. Travelt told me about them.” The cube bunny slid past the question about where she’d come from, the dry zone before she’d hit the Gloss. “He knew all about them. In the company he worked for… Dyna-something…”

  “Zauber,” said McNihil. “DynaZauber. Like the song.”

  That produced a frown. “What song?”

  “You know. Beethoven. The Ninth. About how it’s all going to bind uns wieder.”

  The cube bunny shook her head. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “Just as well. The only reason those people want to do any bind-ing is so they can get into our pockets easier. Just another word for connecting.�
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  A little flinch; the girl he saw in his eyes was probably more sensitive to dirty words than the cube bunny underneath. After a moment, she nodded. “Anyway, he used to work in the division that made that stuff. That’s in your eyes. But that was before he got promoted.”

  “Too bad he’s dead, then. Maybe he could’ve told me why my debits keep coming back.” Every month, he wrote out an actual hard-copy paper check, payment for the firmness-overlay maintenance, and every month it came bouncing back with a form letter about the service having been discontinued, thanks for your patronage, be sure and try our other fine enhanced experiential products, blah and more blah.

  “Oh?” Mentioning something about money had perked up the cube bunny’s interest.

  “This late in the game,” groused McNihil, “you’d think companies could get their billing straight.” He shook his head. “For a while there, I was putting the money away in another account, until I finally figured, screw it, might as well spend it.” That’d been right after he’d gotten bounced off the Collection Agency’s operatives list, and things had gotten tight as an anaconda’s rectum before he’d lined up another paying gig. “They sort it out and want their money, they can come and get it. Fat chance, though.”

  The girl didn’t know what he was talking about. She was still fascinated, childlike, by his eyes, peering into them and trying to see what she couldn’t.

  “When you look at me,” said the cube bunny after a moment. “What do you see?”

  “Another world.”

  If not a better one, then at least more to his liking. I’ve gotten used to it, McNihil told himself. Like a dream that you know you’re dreaming, but don’t want to wake up from.

  For a few seconds, he let the limits of his vision expand beyond the girl sitting in front of him-the tough little, soft little Lupino clone, one of the compensating gifts that his eyes bestowed on him-and out past the gray walls of the shabby apartment. Past the unlit hallways and the faint smells of dog-bottle alcohol and sweating bedsheets that seeped out from under the doors, and out into the night’s alleys and cracked sidewalks, with their pools of streetlamp glow that didn’t reach from one to the other, that left patches of darkness stitched with buzzing neon above the steps of basement gin mills that you descended like marching into one’s grave.

  The world in the shabby apartment, that smelled like burnt coffee and suspicion, and the one outside that McNihil saw-it was real enough for him. That the cube bunny, and everyone else, didn’t see it made no difference.

  “You kinda see me, though,” decided the cube bunny. “I mean, I’m real-I’m really here-and you can see that. So that’s a help.”

  “Sure is.” That was the difference between what he’d had done and all those old-fashioned total-environment simulations, that unsubtle virtual bunk that simply substituted one gross set of cooked-up sensory feed for what came in unassisted from the real world. The problem with those sim arrangements, and the reason they’d died a quick, merciful death on the consumer market even before the bandwidth and nerve-receptor bugs could be worked out, was that nobody could get any work done with them. Not in the real world, at least.

  Whereas the thin-film insertion surgery that he’d paid for-and gotten; McNihil still didn’t regret it-was basically a businessman’s product. He supposed that some of the execs that had been standing around the corpse probably had accessible over-layers inside their own eyes. Controlled by the muscles of the eye socket, the interplay of the rectus lateralis and the superior and inferior oblique muscles, pulling and distorting the spheres of aqueous humor-not to focusing on nearer or farther objects, but activating one inserted layer or another, switching the perceived world into translucent spreadsheets or databases floating above the hard objects of people and other real things.

  “That’s how it works for them,” said McNihil. He’d told the cube bunny all about it, as he’d gotten up and poured himself the remainder of the coffee in the pot. He stood leaning against the side of the kitchen doorway, sipping the lukewarm, kerosenelike fluid. “Strictly business.” It was a big reason why he had such an aversion to executive types, like that DZ bunch with Harrisch at their head. “You can be talking to them,” he mused aloud, “and you’ll be looking at them, right in the face, and they’re looking back at you. And then you see the eyes shifting, like they’re looking past you into the distance, or at some place just past their noses. And you know they’re not really looking at you, they’re reading some market-update numbers that’d just crawled in over the wire.” McNihil shrugged. “I’ve always just found that kind of offensive.”

  “But that’s not what you see.” The cube bunny held her own empty cup enfolded in her hands. “I mean… it’s not some kind of business thing with you.”

  “Well… maybe.” McNihil shook his head. “I don’t really know, anymore. I’ve been seeing things this way for a long time now. I don’t make any distinctions between what it was I wanted to see and…” It was hard to say. “And what it’s useful for me to see. I don’t know if those are two different things.”

  The cube bunny had another question, very serious and important, the way children’s questions are. “Am I… pretty? The way you see me?”

  The way he saw her… the way he saw everything. He supposed there was no way of really telling her. Just what it was that he saw. There wouldn’t be any shared points of reference between himself and a creature of survival-oriented sexuality such as the one sitting in front of him, like some kind of grayed-out butterfly caught in a dingy cardboard box with his name on it. The whole perceptual system of hard and firm and soft reality-he might’ve been able to explain that, with some effort on both their parts. It was really just the difference between the hard components of the world, the things that really existed, that didn’t go away even if you’d wanted them to; and the firm overlay that was programmed in over the hard stuff, that transformed the other world into the one he felt and saw and smelled and tasted; and the soft, which was all that he could pick up and move around, change and destroy. Just as in that world, the unaltered one, on the other side of the reality line: there were some things you could do something about, and other things you couldn’t.

  “You look fine,” said McNihil truthfully. “You’re absolutely lovely.”

  “Really?”

  “Why should I lie to you?” She did look lovely to him; better than in the smeared, wavering reflection on the side of the coffeepot. He’d paid to see a world that was to his liking. Not beautiful-it was based, after all, on cultural artifacts of more than a century ago, the bleak and brooding crime and thriller movies of the 1930s and forties-but with beautiful things in it. More beautiful, actually, for being surrounded by constant threat and darkness. So that if he could sit in a shabby, too-small room that smelled like dust settling on bare, flickering lightbulbs, if he could sit across from a girl who looked-at least to him-like an actress from those ancient films that nobody watched anymore, a woman with heartbreaking eyes… that was all right by him. And if she looked both sad and desperate, fragile and eternal, a mouth that was softly red even when seen in black and white…

  Then the money he’d paid to the surgeons had been well spent.

  The cube bunny hadn’t said anything, but had smiled at him. McNihil supposed he’d said the right thing. Even if it was the truth. Sometimes it worked out that way.

  He supposed her smile meant something else as well. You shouldn’t think so much, McNihil told himself. About the things you see. The way you see them.

  “But… you don’t really know.” The cube bunny’s smile faded. “If I’m pretty or not. ’Cause you don’t really see me.” A tear trembled against her lashes. “You just see that stuff that’s in there, inside your eyes.”

  “That’s not how it works.” McNihil set his empty cup down on the counter and walked back out of the kitchen. “It’s a little more subtle than that. It has to be.” He didn’t imagine he had any way of explaining these things to someone l
ike her. The world she’d come out of was too far different from any he lived in, on either side of the firm line. “Only idiots want to inhabit a world separate from anyone else. I mean literally idiots, would-be idiots; you know, from that idios kosmos notion of a private universe.” He could see that he’d lost her on that one. “There’s just no point in thinking that you’re picking up things that don’t exist, or talking to people that are just part of some dummied-up sensory load. That kind of stuff died out back in the mini-theme-park days. Kids standing around with big ugly goggles on, swatting away at nothing. That kind of stuff’s crap. But seeing the same things that everybody else does, but just seeing them differently… hey, that’s the way it is for everyone.”

  “It is?”

  “Sure,” said McNihil. He was on a roll now. He’d walked over behind the couch, standing just in back of where the cube bunny sat. “There might even be some people who’re so connected up… that they wouldn’t even be able to see how beautiful you are.” Like that other poor bastard, thought McNihil. The dead one. What’d the late Travelt’s problem been, that he’d gotten into that prowler shit? When he had someone like this available and willing. Just went to prove something that McNihil had believed for a long time. That people engineered, with all the craft and will they could summon, their own annihilations.

  The cube bunny said nothing. McNihil wondered if she had a name. He supposed he could give her one, something cute and temporary; it only had to last as long as whatever connection existed between them. Which was probably measurable in hours. If that, he thought glumly. She was the loveliest thing that had ever been inside the dark, cramped space of his working and living accommodation. Like some self-destructive flower that had bloomed here, begging to be crushed inside anyone’s fist.