Mindkiller

by Spider Robinson

  And when the door raised itself, music did indeed come drifting up the stairs. But it wasn’t Old Jake. It was the Yardbird, these forty-four years dead.

  Whoever was down there was a friend.

  It was Karen who sat in my living room, crosslegged on her usual chair. Even if the music had masked the sounds of my arrival she could not have helped seeing me peripherally, but she gave no sign, kept staring at the place where the far wall met the ceiling. I sat down quietly in the other Lounger, dialing for tea.

  She was listening to one of the last Dial sessions at WOR, in ’47, when Bird finally got the band he wanted in New York. Miles and Max Roach and Duke Jordan. And all the smack he wanted. There’s a Mingus piece, usually called “Gunslingin’ Bird,” whose full title is “If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Lot of Dead Copycats.” As my tea arrived, the thought jumped into my head: if Charlie Parker had been a wirehead, all those copycats would have had to work for a living.

  When the last note of “Bird of Paradise” cut off, and not a moment before, Karen turned the stereo not down, but off. I remembered that the Fader had liked her.

  “Hi, Joe.”

  “Hello, Karen.”

  “Anticlimax. The runaway child comes back home.”

  “Why?”

  She took her time answering. “I don’t know if I can put it into words. You…you’ve done…a lot for me, and, and that means that you must…care about me some and I’m gonna go do something that’s gonna get sticky and you wanted to talk me out of it and I didn’t give you a chance, I got defensive and took it personal and cut you right off.” She paused for air. “I mean, I’m gonna do this anyway but I just thought you’d feel better if you did your best to talk me out of it first, you know, like you’d be easier in your mind. It was wrong of me to leave like that, it was…it was like…” She was slowing down again. “…like not caring about you.”

  I was looking at my hands. “And you’re not afraid I’ll try to prevent you?”

  “No. You’re not my father.”

  “Have you hired a reader yet?”

  “Not yet. I’ve been thinking.”

  I looked up and met her gaze. I had decided on the way home. “Good. You don’t need one anymore.”

  She twitched her shoulders violently. “I—you—but—” She stopped herself and closed her eyes. She drew in a big lungful of air, pursed her lips, and blew it sl-o-owly through her teeth, ssshhhoooooo, did it again slower. Then she opened her eyes and said, “Thank you, Joe.”

  My hangover was gone.

  “When do we start?” she asked after a moment.

  “Have you eaten?”

  “I brought cornbread, and some pretty good preserves, and some Java coffee.”

  “We start after brunch.”

  As we were setting the table she took me by the shoulders and looked at me for a long moment. Her expression was faintly quizzical. Suddenly she closed in and came up on tiptoe and was kissing me thoroughly, her fingers digging into the back of my head. I had salad bowls in either hand and could neither resist nor cooperate. She did not kiss me the way a whore kisses her biggest spender. She kissed me the way a wife kisses a husband who remembered their fifth anni—

  Hiatus.

  She was two meters away, leaning back against the wall with her hands outspread. Her eyes were round. Salad dressing stained her blouse and dripped from her cheek, and there was lettuce all to hell and gone between us. I looked up at the ceiling. “Dammit,” I cried bitterly, “that one wasn’t fair!”

  “Joe, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

  “I wasn’t talking to you!” I stopped myself. I tried her exhaling trick and it helped a lot. “Karen, I’m sorry. That had nothing to do with you, nothing at all. It was—”

  “I know. Somebody in your past.”

  I shrugged. “It could be. I honestly don’t know.” I told her about my blackout condition. I had never told anyone before—but she and I were going to go to war together, and she had a right to know.

  When I was done explaining, all she said was, “Let me see if there’s a safe dosage,” and then she came into my arms and hugged me and kissed me, the way a friend kisses a friend, and that was just fine.

  And we ate, and that was just fine too, and then we adjourned to the living room. Where I pulled the terminal out of the wall recess and heated it up. And the next two hours were interesting indeed.

  There are many better keyboard men than me. I came quite late to programming, and will never have the genius level of aptitude that some are born with. On my good days I consider myself a talented amateur. There are enormous holes in my knowledge of computers, and probably always will be. But blind chance gifted me with a computer the equal of any in North America, with programmed-in owner’s manual, at a point in my life during which I had nothing better to do than study it. It is so supple and flexible a machine that I have never been tempted to anthropomorphize it. It can interface with almost any network while remaining effectively invisible. Its own capacity is four terabytes, four times ten to the twelfth bytes.

  Karen watched for the first half hour, but after the first ten minutes she was just being polite. Finally I told her to go dig Bird on the headphones, and she did. At that point I was only puzzled. Subsequently I did some things with that most versatile of computers that would have shocked the IRS, a few that would have fascinated the CIA, and even one or two that might have surprised the computer’s original owner if he or she were still alive. I went from puzzled through intrigued to mystified, stayed there for about an hour, then moved on to baffled, proceeding almost at once to frustrated. Karen heard me swearing and came over to sit wordlessly beside me with her hand at the base of my neck. Within another fifteen minutes, frustrated modulated into vaguely alarmed, and stayed there.

  Finally I ordered hard copy printout and cleared. “‘You got it, buddy,’” I growled in my best Tom Waits imitation. “‘The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away.’”

  “What is it, Joe?”

  “I’m damned if I know, and I’m sure I can’t explain it very well. You haven’t studied economics, let alone business economics. It’s—” I broke off, groping for an analogy within her experience. “Like a motorcycle. You can break down what a motorcycle does, chart the path and interaction of different forces and materials, follow the power flow. If you can visualize the motorcycle as a series of power relationships, you can locate its weak points—where it can be most disabled with least effort. That’s what I’ve been trying to do with the wirehead industry. But I can’t get a computer-model that works. If you built a motorcycle like this it would whistle ‘Night In Tunisia,’ make a pot of coffee, and explode. I can’t make sense of the power flow…and it seems to have only the most peripheral relationship to the money flow…damn it, there’s nothing the IRS could object to. Stupidity isn’t illegal. But it just…feels wrong, feels like something is being juggled. But I can’t understand how or why or by whom. That makes me highly nervous.”

  “So, since you can’t diagram out this motorcycle, you can’t find the weak points?”

  “I can’t be sure. We’ve got to get inside and nose around, learn things that aren’t in any computer. Field work.”

  She nodded. “Fine. Where?”

  “That’s another problem. There are three major corporations, as your source told you—and by the way, if two of them are really the same outfit, I can’t prove it. We might get useful information at any of three places.”

  “Where?”

  “Germany, Switzerland, Nova Scotia.”

  “Which is better?”

  “The biggest outfit is the West German one, in Hamburg. That’d be the hardest to crack. I don’t speak German—”

  “I do.”

  “Point. The smallest of the three, and that ain’t small, is in Geneva. We can get by with English in Switzerland but I think there’s the least information to be had there. The middle-size bear is in Halifax�
��”

  “—and the Canadian border is a joke. That settles that. My stuff’s still where I left it? I’ll pack.”

  “Yes, do that,” I said, and set immediately to making my own preparations for departure. I wasn’t sure why she was impatient to be going, but I knew why I was. I could not shake the nagging fear that I had tripped some subtle watchdog program without knowing it. There are ways to avoid being backtracked, and I believed I knew the best ones.

  But I wasn’t positive.

  We took four days getting to Halifax. We had to keep changing vehicles, and one does not want to enter a strange city exhausted from travel. Especially not if one wishes to vanish as quickly as possible into the shadows of that strange city. We found a cheap apartment house that still accepted cash in the old part of town, on a sorry, broken-down sin-strip called Gottingen Street. If you went up on the roof you could see the harbor and the bridge to Dartmouth. You could also leave the building in any of three directions without special equipment, which was what closed the deal. We took a year’s lease on a two-bedroom as Mr. and Mrs. Something-or-Other, and by the time I hitchhiked back from where I’d dumped our final car, Karen had us unpacked and food in the fridge, coffee made.

  “Oh, Joe, this is exciting. This town is so strange; I think I’m going to like it. Let’s go for a walk and plan our first move.”

  “Wait,” I said. “I don’t think we should do either one just yet. I haven’t needed to bring this up until now, but…let me tell you what happened to me on my last walk in New York.” I did not do that, but I did give a brief outline of the wireshop incident. Her eyes were wide when I was done. “Do you see what I mean? It has the same wrong feel as I got when I took the readouts. That zombie was no genius inventor. When I saw that homemade helmet of his, I couldn’t believe someone else hadn’t thought of it five years ago. Hell, they could have built one of those in the eighties. But he had the only one I ever heard of. And he got blown away, along with the Mark I, the week his patent application went in—” I broke off and frowned. “You can’t burgle the Patent Office’s computer files. But maybe I can find out whether anyone has made official inquiries through channels about that particular patent. That’s public record.”

  Before I had left my home I’d had my computer select three different acceptable but unused phone numbers in Halifax, diddle the Atlantic Tel computer into believing they were high-credit subscribers in good standing, initiate conference calls from all three, and leave those circuits open, on standby. Why not? I wasn’t paying for it. I dialed one of those numbers now, and when I was put through I got out the portable terminal I travel with and clipped its squeaker to the phone. I was interfaced with my home computer.

  I asked it my questions, frowned, and rephrased my questions. This time I got an answer, and it couldn’t have been on screen for more than three seconds before I was ordering the computer to break circuit, wasting that means of access. I was scared enough to wet my pants.

  “There is no such application on file,” I said in a shaky voice. “No patent remotely related to wireheading or inductance or anything to do with the goddam brain has been sought by anybody in the last year. Current to three o’clock this afternoon.”

  “So either that shock doc was stone crazy—”

  “Or someone can subvert the U.S. Patent Office. And we know about it. God’s teeth. The only people with interest enough and leverage enough are the big wirehead outfits—and why the hell would they take risks like that to suppress something that would probably triple their income or better?”

  “Jesus.”

  “It’s wrong, it feels wrong, it’s all just…off. And I’m getting very nervous. Let’s not go for that walk.”

  We watched TV instead, curled up in the master bedroom, until we fell asleep. I slept poorly. Bad dreams.

  When a week had gone by without incident or alarm, I began to relax. Until that time we made believe that we had never heard of wireheading, and kept to ourselves. We talked a lot. The entertainment facilities of our room were a joke, and I was not going to call home again until and unless I had to. Part of our talk involved practical matters of planning, a good many hours inasmuch as we had almost nothing to go on. We were able to kill much time inventing new contingencies. But there was a limit to how far we could stretch that, and finally there was nothing left for us to talk about except the stories of our lives.

  Karen started it. She talked about her childhood, starting with the happy parts because they came first chronologically. They didn’t last long. Her father had been a monster in almost a biological sense. She told me a great deal about him over the course of perhaps a week, first in a two-hour monologue she ended by vomiting to exhaustion, and then in a series of long conversations that wandered everywhere but always led back sooner or later to that extraordinary man. I use that last word reluctantly, but I can find no legitimate excuse to disown him. I wish I could. His death should have been celebrated. Well, it had been—by Karen surely, and likely many others—but I mean nationally. Planetarily.

  But although he had never been especially intelligent, Wolfgang Scholz had always had the animal cunning never to hurt anyone who could effectively complain about it.

  About her mother, Ilse, Karen told me little, and most of that simply involved incidents at which the woman had been present. Apparently she was one of those cipherlike people that true sadists keep around. Having no personality to destroy, they cannot be used up.

  The telling of her life was good for Karen. She had told most of these anecdotes to others over the years—but she had never told anyone all of them. In telling them all together, perhaps she was able to perceive some kind of gestalt pattern she had previously missed. Perhaps by replaying every minute of her life with her father she was better able to exorcise him, one step closer to being able to accept and forget him. Every time you play the record, the signal-to-noise ratio gets worse. Her consumption of alcohol dropped steadily to zero. She cut way back on tobacco. She actually began to display signs of neatness, become more careful in personal grooming.

  And finally it was my turn.

  And of course there was nowhere to start but at the beginning.

  I remember, as an infant remembers womb dreams, the click and the sight of the mine coming up like a featureless jack-in-the-box and very bright light and then very dark dark. And then I was born.

  When I realized that I was alive, my first thought was that VA hospitals were better than I’d heard. I was in a powered bed in what looked like the bedroom of a captain of industry, with no medical equipment in sight. My head did not hurt nearly as badly as I thought it should, and nothing else hurt at all. Well, I said to myself, you’ve managed to come up smelling like a rose again, Corporal—

  And paused.

  Because what I intended to end that sentence with was my name. And I did not know it anymore.

  It was not really that much of a shock, then. In all the books and movies, amnesia is always temporary. But I yelled. A man came in the door with an icebag. A man so completely nondescript that I could not tell whether I knew him or not. I thought that was symptomatic too at the time, but of course it was the Fader. He sat down and put the ice on my head and told me that he had gotten the son of a bitch.

  I’m not sure which questions I asked first, but within a couple of days I had as much information as the Fader could give me. By the end of a month I knew almost all I was ever going to know.

  When the mine went off in the jungle I was, as best I can reconstruct it, twenty-four or thereabouts. When I woke up in that bed under the offices of that deserted warehouse, for what I believed was the first time, I was—again, best guess—about thirty.

  Of what I did, where I was, during the intervening six years, I have no slightest recollection.

  Of my life before the mine went off I have only random shards of memory, disordered, fragmentary, incomplete. I do not for instance know my name, nor have I been able to discover it.

  It�
��s like a million file cards scattered across a great field, more than half of them facedown. Random bits of information are clear and sharp, but there is no context. I remember a family, remember childhood incidents involving three vividly recalled people, but I do not know their names or what has become of them. I remember growing up in a small town; if I ever see it I’ll know it, but I doubt I’ll ever find it. I remember that we moved to New York in my early adolescence, but in the four years since the Fader put that icebag on my head I have walked through most of the five boroughs without finding that street. Ten years is a long time in New York. It may not exist anymore.

  I remember enlisting and bits of Basic and there’s a lot of chaotic, badly edited video footage of the horrors of war—in fact, the army days are probably the period I retain most of. But to my sour amusement I cannot recall my serial number.

  What the Fader had to say was mighty interesting. We had met a couple of months before in a bar. I had busted a stein over the head of someone who was attempting to knife him. We had become friends, and a couple of weeks ago I had invited him home, and a week ago I had showed him my real home. The Fader stated that he was a composer—who, the times being what they were, dabbled in the small-time con (mostly variations on the classic Man in the Street) and an occasional mugging. He told me that I was a burglar, apparently for the sheer love of it since I obviously had, as he put it, adequate resources.

  How had I found my home? How would he know? He had been too polite to ask, and I had not volunteered the information. Or, unfortunately, much else.

  One guess suggests itself. One of the two emergency exits from the underground apartment is a long tunnel, which at its far end is camouflaged, quite realistically, as an abandoned sewage outfall, malodorous and unattractive to inspection. Could I have been so afraid of someone or something that I tried to hide in there, and found myself in Wonderland?