Silver Screen

by Justina Robson

  “And you're stroppy,” 901 said, “and it shows that you need to do more exercise.”

  “What?” I snapped. “Nowhere in hell does it say that. It's a thinking pattern test, not a bleeding medical.”

  “Yes, but it shows that you are now a couch potato with strong positive attitudes to personal fitness and competitive sports.”

  “Well, it's wrong.” I shook my head, tightened the belt on my tired old dressing gown and stamped back to the bedroom, where I curled up in the quilt with a glass of hot skimmed milk. Although I had to admit I didn't feel like sitting around, I had to do it now. It was a matter of principle.

  “And irrational,” 901 added. “Interesting. I must say it was more beneficial than I expected.”

  “Great,” I said, “let's propose it as a new therapy for anyone whose friends think they're fat, lazy, neurotic, and fuzzy-minded.”

  “I didn't say that…”

  “Ah, gimme a break.” And that was the light-relief side, all five minutes of it.

  Lula and I parted later that day with familiar awkwardness. She walked with me to the departure gate on station and gazed at me with stoicism. “Well, have a safe trip,” she said, “and stick to the script. You'll be all right. It'll be over before you know it. Tell Og I said to get better soon.”

  I was going to visit him before returning to station. In the executive lounge area I could see Maria and Joaquin waiting for me. I didn't make eye contact. When I looked back at Lula, I saw very little hope in her eyes.

  “Got your number,” I said, tapping my head and trying to smile. I'd read it from her datastrip.

  “If you don't hear from me for a while,” she said, “don't worry. I'll get back to you.”

  A grain of anxiety stopped what I had been going to say about missing her and wishing she was coming, too. “Why? Where do you think you'll be going?” We both knew she'd be lucky to last the week out with a job at OptiNet. Orange CoreOps had found out what she'd done to her room.

  “I got some plans, but—” she shrugged “—can't say right now.”

  I frowned at her. “You're not going all Roy on me, are you?”

  She smiled and her eyes were warm and sympathetic. I felt her take hold of my arm and she gave me a hug, a most un-Lula-like thing. “Don't sweat it,” she said and turned away quickly. I thought I saw her eyes shining.

  “Jilly!” Maria called from the other side of the ticket check, and at the same time the loudspeaker announced the final call for the flight.

  I realized this timing was a part of Lula's good-bye and stopped myself midstride from going after her. Instead, I stood and watched her back as she marched away along the corridor and vanished into the milling people on the crosswalk. A really bad feeling came over me, a big black gap swelling inside, and I realized that all I had was this number and if she didn't want me to find her I'd never see her again. The old me would have had a field day on that. As it was, I accepted it as something I'd get miserable about later, when it actually happened. I picked my bag up again and went through the ticket check.

  It was a three-hour journey down, and sufficiently bumpy on atmospheric entry to keep Maria quiet in the other half of our double seat. I played poker with the two engineers opposite us. We used mints as chips and let them float in the air between us like a constellation of wealth, eating what we won, until the gravity well got hold of them and they fell onto the table and rolled everywhere.

  On the final approach to the airport I stared out of the porthole and examined the weather. It was grey and cold under the clouds, and this added to my ill temper as we hit the runway, and I tasted mints trying to come back up. During the flight I had been struggling to ignore a pathetically urgent voice-mail, relayed via implant from 901, which told me that the Greens couldn't effect removing the diary from the suit themselves, and I would have to get it myself on my trip to Leeds Central. If you asked me, they deserved to poison themselves with their own wretched biobombs, and I assuaged my anger by imagining a day in the past at Edinburgh in which I kindly invited them to dinner for a nice meal of spaghetti arsenicara. Of course, that did end up in the present with me incarcerated, even if life looked like it would have been a lot simpler.

  I lost the poker game, too.

  Strasbourg's nature as a city of justice and culture for all brought with it a wealth of swanky hotels and, due to the profile of the case, we were put up in the swankiest of all: the Mozart. My room was large and ostentatious, with a huge four-poster bed and antique furniture. Its vast windows opened onto a balcony with a view over most of the city roofs and plenty of sky above which, even grey and raining, was blissful after the station's confined spaces. The Mozart was also a biobuilding of architectural brilliance, expressed in pleasingly asymmetric, natural curves and had excellent facilities—whirlpool baths, steam unit, omnidirectional shower, massage table, therapeutic consultancy station, drinks, snacks, full entertainment suite, and carpets almost two inches deep, perfectly clean. It was space and luxury and I sat on the end of the bed and enjoyed its best feature: soundproofing. I could just hear the trickle of rain on the gutters, if I tried very hard.

  In my professional estimation the best thing for me would be a nice sleep on the carpet in front of the windows—good for the back, and I hadn't had decent rest in days. I took one of the pillows and lay down there, bathing in the natural daylight and heavy with the old home gravity, and it was one of the best couple of hours I'd had in a long, long time.

  When Maria came around in the evening she found me clean and neat, dressed for dinner, and sitting at the desk reviewing all the work 901 had done for me on the sly. My four unreturned calls to the hospital may have given me a few lines on the forehead, but otherwise I tried to present an air of cool efficiency. It must have worked.

  “Well, you're looking much better!” she enthused from the doorway, all patent-leather heels and wool tailoring. No Joaquin now, since we were off Company territory, but this only made her behave more like a schoolgirl escaping the chaperone. “Coming for cocktails with the team?”

  There was nothing I felt less like doing. I smiled and checked my lipstick in the mirror. “I'd love to.”

  We ascended to the rooftop restaurant in the lift—a great improvement on the last one I'd been in—and stepped out into a kind of crystal-lit fairyland where the pillars were curved, living wood, and the roof a single clear sheet of concave, but optically true, plastic, dancing with rain. In between the tables water features tinkled and splashed gaily. It was a bit much, but the music and the atmosphere somehow remained stately, even so. Josef Hallett was seated by himself at the bar, drinking champagne out of the proper kind of glass.

  Maria wanted me to go with her and the tableful of corporate high spirits, but I made an excuse about getting my own drink and propped myself up not too far away from him, a tactful kind of distance which would let him ignore me if he really wanted to. I cast a surreptitious glance at his shoes.

  “I should think these are too cheap for your tastes,” he said, looking up from what he was reading. I thought it would be a legal thing, but it was only a barpad showing the menu.

  “’The time has come,’” I said, quoting Lewis on a whim, “’to talk of many things: Of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings, And why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.’”

  “I'm sorry?” He stared at me.

  “If I'm not mistaken,” I said, “I have as much chance of making a difference tomorrow with this present situation as of seeing a flying pig. I don't like being the stooge. By the time I've decided whether or not I will be the stooge, I'm sure the Company would like to rethink their lenient angle on letting me stay alive—” I ignored the barman's raised eyebrow as he appeared and heard this “—and so I'm here to ask you, if you don't mind, to be a witness to what I just said, so that if anything should happen to me you might care to find out about it.”

  He exhaled through his nose and smiled, taken aback but
not shocked out of his seat. As he took a moment to compose a reply, I indicated his glass and nodded at the barman who set off, reluctantly, to fetch another.

  “Are you asking me to investigate what happens if—if—it happens to you. Someone who exhaled three pounds of sandwiches onto my shoes?”

  “I'm not asking you anything,” I said, ignoring the dig, “just making an observation in a casual conversation at a bar.”

  “Uh-huh.” He stared at his drink. “Well, I'll be interested to see what you decide to say in addition to the documents so far submitted.” He looked up and smiled. “Good luck.”

  “Likewise.” I took my drink from the disappointed bartender and went over to spend the rest of the evening with the excited crowd of Company lawyers. After leaving that nugget with Hallett, I felt better.

  If I'd been a smoker I'd have lit a cigarette the next morning as I sat in the limousine. I'd have dragged hard on it with my big, marooned Bette Davis lips, and stared out at the reporters on the streets with mascaraed eyes too smart for their own good. Similarly, if I'd been starring in a well-made courtroom drama, then I'd have got a stirring and/or sinister pep talk from Maria, the voice of the Company legal team. As it turned out, I got to wear the smart black suit and cool shoes. The rest of it was less like a dream.

  Maria leaned forwards to tell me not to talk under my breath because of reporters’ distance mikes, not to mouth words because of the lip readers, not to pick my nose or rub my face or shift or shuffle or fart, for obvious and aforementioned reasons, and to attempt to speak in a pleasant voice no matter what I had to say. I thanked her for her advice and stared straight ahead whilst I used the call centre. The Leeds Central receptionist picked up and said she'd put another tick on my call list: no, no improvement, no worsening.

  I was called to be interviewed in court an hour or two into the proceedings. The panel of judges had reviewed the evidence submitted in document form and verified its sources. My testimony was to provide the larger part of substantiation of this evidence and I was also there to answer any questions they wanted to ask. No lawyers of any description were permitted to do more than observe or to supply extra information upon demand. They were allocated seats in the main body of the court whilst the media had to shuffle and shove one another on the large balcony circle above.

  As I walked in, escorted by an armed court guard and one of the administrative officials, I looked eagerly across to see who was representing Roy and his case. So much thought had been given to the Company's position that we hadn't speculated much on this, assuming that he had found himself a set of lawyers sympathetic to the Green Machine cause and paid them with his savings, for Roy earned a fortune and had spent almost nothing. Although I knew that most of his money must have gone into the Shoal in some way or other I still expected to see someone, but as I reached the steps up to the witness box I saw Maria, Josef, and the team arranged in serried ranks to my left, whilst on the right every single seat was empty.

  My heart sank for Roy. I wondered what was going on, and remembered at that moment that he wouldn't have been allowed to proceed without some kind of representation. Where were they?

  I took my seat and tried not to look directly up at the faces of the news teams on the balcony, with their third eyes all trained on me for the slightest reaction. It was difficult not to notice how many of them there were, and in the brief reports I had heard they were making much of the trial, including the feature of it that their broadcasts were being carried by the same company and the same AI now coming into opposition in the case.

  Directly across from me, the six judges sat at their long table. We were all fully miked, and each one of us had a court clerk seated beside us ready with any of the documents or objects that might be called on. To my right, and their left, a giant flatscreen was set up for displays, currently showing the International Human Rights symbol.

  The judges I already knew from briefing: Sikorska, Harbutt, Wang, Petroshenko, Nyung, and Mendoza. They ranged in age from late thirties to Harbutt, who was in his eighties. Each one of them gave me a solemn nod of recognition and I was sworn in upon the European flag.

  Sikorska was first to speak. “We understand that you are a doubly unusual witness, Miss O'Connell. Not only are you one of only eighteen AI psychologists qualified, but you have a perfect memory. Is that correct?”

  In my peripheral vision there was a surge of movement on the balcony. I nodded. “That is correct.” My heart was thudding with nervous tension. I hadn't expected them to start with this, and didn't immediately see where it was leading.

  “Would you demonstrate, for the indulgence of the court, the extreme precision of your memory? We wish to establish that you are, as is claimed, as much to be relied upon as more conventional ROM, of which many other records are comprised.”

  Again I nodded, not sure how they could test it, or exactly why this was critical. Finally I lost my resolve and glanced quickly up only to see the warning redlight camera eyes, showing live broadcast.

  Josef Hallett was permitted to approach, and everyone except me was given access to a document. I waited, calming down slowly, certain that at least this I could do right. “The court is shown a transcript of a meeting, chosen at random—” he glanced at me, but I couldn't read what it meant “—from a selection provided by OptiNet to the court for testing purposes. Miss O'Connell, I ask you to recall a meeting held on 11 January 2058 at 9:00 AM. It was concerned with the appointment of a new co-controller for the orbiting station.” He paused.

  Tito Belle was the person he was talking about. We met to discuss his request for promotion, but I wondered how random this was. Why, of all meetings, pick one directly concerned with him? I tried hard not to show any reaction on my face, but I was instantly on guard. “I remember it.”

  “At this meeting, Roy Croft opposed his appointment. Do you know why?”

  “He felt that it would damage team spirit, because Belle was a self-promoter and individualist who wouldn't cooperate sufficiently with others when work became difficult.” Saying this made me think again about Belle and Roy. I wouldn't say a light came on in my head, but I definitely had the sensation of a theory dawning there, mostly that the Company was subtly reminding me of what fate awaited should things turn sour here. Meanwhile, Hallett continued.

  “His exact words?”

  There was an audible murmur of incredulity in the room at this.

  “He said, ‘Tito'd sell his organs off one by one if he thought it would make him popular with upper management. I'd rather have amoebic dysentery and trust my shit to evolve into something more useful than have him in a sealed office where I can't see him.’”

  A flurry of nervous laughter rose and fell, and one or two of the judges smiled to themselves.

  “And, to complete the test, could you tell the court what the group secretary said just before she left the room that day—this is from the run-on recording taken automatically.”

  “That would be Rose Ruiz, she wasn't the group secretary; she was a stand-in supplied from the PharmaChem division on station because Tyle was ill that day. She said, ‘The minutes will be distributed after editing on Wednesday…no, Thursday. I have a presentation to work on.’” I repeated this without effort as I heard, and saw, the astonished faces around me. It was like being a performing monkey and I hated it.

  Hallett sat down and Sikorska continued. “Thank you. I now have some questions relating to highly specific situations, which I am sure you will be able to answer for us.” She paused to let me nod my assent again. “In the evidence submitted we were all interested to read about the history of the JM machine series which led up to the generation of the present defence witness, 901. Please would you inform us whether, at any time during your experience of it, there have been any changes made to the core programming of 901 or its predecessors, 900 and 899?”

  “Not by human hands,” I said. “They write themselves. Such a change is not possible for a single human being to
make.”

  “Why is that exactly, please, Miss O'Connell?” Harbutt asked.

  “As mentioned in the theoretical study, the JM generations ceased to function in the same way as older-style computers at generation 376. Since then they have progressively increased their organic content and no longer have a strict distinction between the categories of hardware and software. To change the core processing you would have to make physical changes which are, at present, only understood by a few people.”

  “And was Roy Croft one of those people?” Harbutt said.

  I paused; this was a difficult question. “Not without assistance,” I said at last. “Roy had the ability to calculate for change, but not any kind of practical ability or even knowledge of the substances involved.”

  The judges made notes, or bent their heads for a moment and conferred. The rest of us in the room waited. Where the seats were full I could see that whisperings and urgent notes were being passed.

  “What we need to establish, Miss O'Connell,” Nyung said, looking up from his personal display, “is the extent to which the JM series has been, and is now, independent of human interference for its successful propagation and continuation. The submission documents suggest that the role actually played by OptiNet has, for the last sixteen years, been entirely auxiliary, acting as a provider of substance and power only.”

  “OptiNet provides what was specified by the JM series as necessary for its physical continuation, yes,” I said, “in the form of electrical energy and material substances.”

  “And in your recollection has there ever been any human intervention necessary for the continued existence of any generation of the JM series since—” he glanced down at his note “—376?”