by David Brin
?
Yes yes, of course the Yodas will know good from bad. Why? Because they are made of Us. Can’t we trust … Us?
What do you mean, LLLLOL? Sarcasm?
Why do this? Is that your question?
For my country. Living in Bluffville instead of D.C. is a sacrifice. Yeah.… they say I can go anywhere I want and do anything I want in Sim-D.C., but they don’t seem to understand that there is a difference. Despite all their tests, they seem to know little about me. Sim is the smell of dry blank paper, all edges, cutting me with no. It’s okay though. I have a choice.
Oh? You take pills too?
Skipping through the wires one night, she’d found this erratic flavor, this African-rug color, and enlarged her ping. She thinks toward it as if growing a new hand on pathways laid down by DNA: inexorable. The Interlocutor is a concise sensory experience she cannot describe in words. Except for her mouth tingling with a skein of color, she would know for sure that it is her handlers trying to test her.
That would be all right, too. She likes games.
* * *
Bluffville has few sounds at night. There is only the repeating cymbal-dash of streetlights; the low, boring drone of closed shops and gray bars repeating every block like a ribbon of DNA. A single pickup saying left turn soon soon soon instead of mobs of turn signals chiming in stutters.
The Mountain broods above, black against black, visible only because it holds no stars. Lucy expands to fill the vacuum. She is such a concert of wavelengths that she almost goes back to sleep. But the ride is short.
* * *
Beepthrough retina scan. Even at this hour a woman stands with a big gun, and Lucy knows legions of this woman could burst out of secret doors at the slightest hint of trouble. The laughably serious silent men accompany her through hallways she probably knows better than they, the vast white space stranged pleasantly by her seeing different folks: the night shift. They form a new palette. The air smells black despite the numbing whiteness. The two noncolors twist together in her mind, uniting finally in a slow pinwheel that is black, then white, then black, then white.
“I’ll need a double chocolate mocha with triple whipped cream.”
One man nods; taps his phone absently without breaking stride.
“And some kind of coat. I’m cold.”
Tap, tap; stride.
Lucy is not quite sure where this emergency might take her, and fears a barrage of spitting nonsense from suited strangers in sterile rooms. In such cases, she usually nods while brain-blurring them to keep from leaping up and scratching out their eyes from sheer irritation.
She is relieved when they take her to her usual cubicle. No one has spoken to her; no special instructions. She knows there is an emergency, and now knows they trust her to taste it.
Here are photos, Post-Its, a soothing white Phalaenopsis in perfect orchid-arc, from Other Grandma, a white woman with blonde hair who lives in Yuma and plays golf in the Kingdom, as she always proclaims, laughing a huge, burry laugh.
Drop-curl into her big cozy chair. Pick up paper cup; toss back green pill; wash down with dregs of a canned Coke. Cushiony helmet; sweet, silent pause; a warm wrap settled round her shoulders. Steamy orange knife of espresso chocolate placed by an unobtrusive hand stabs, electric, when she takes a sip. Arc-screen on; sharp plunge into her world: thin streaming screaming spaghettis of color blast out of the screen and through her. She soars.
* * *
She can slow or speed the infinite rushing-into-her river; turn it into other manifestations: bursting flowers of color; music rain; avalanche; pixilated crowds from above or angling. Purejoy. Until:
But she can’t really explain what happens to her, how she can tell a dissonant, possibly terroristic e-mail or phone conversation from any other. A blip of colorsound, that is all. An instant’s sickness; swift-gone sienna intent; the smell of coffee burning in the bottom of a carafe.
She clicks her mouse, puts the writhing conversation of the world on hold as she backs up.
Click: magnify.
Click: isolate.
Click: we are on a long trip, and stop at a country place where they seem to know us.
Click: they speak our language but it is a little different.
Click: no it will not happen until next week; some numbers that are a color in Lucy’s brain; she taps them onto a screen almost absently.
Click: no I cannot say exactly where you will hear from me.
Click: a man stands three-dimensional before her, cell phone in hand, his appearance assembled from the profile his cell phone has built for the world to see during the past six months.
He wears a black suit and a white shirt and a navy-blue tie. His gray-blond hair is combed over a bald spot. The suit shifts to tennis shorts for an instant, then to a tuxedo, but she ignores these visual definitions. It is the gray sickness, the lack of empathy that a mere week of feedback taught her to see, hear, feel. She is utterly undistractible, a quality her teachers, her family, her non-friends would all deny, because for her entire life she has been labeled as a misfit flitterbygibbet in need of serious medication.
Click: she sends her notice and surfs back onto the rolling, rollicking hills of wiry tubes of sound, chatterspeed, greyblackblip stop click screen send go. Video of a girl her age but blonde, winking as she drinks an illegal beer and friends laugh: tweeted. Her own desires and fears sometimes stop the flow and she learns to recognize them in various ways. Porn is a green-orange blare that makes her nauseous before her brain parses images; a signal not to pause, but one that flashes frequent.
She goes on, tasting combinations of spoken words, instantaneously translated, scanned by her special brain—human, not machine: she knows her spottings are much more accurate than those made by the machines that fill other halls in clean rooms.
* * *
“Because she was a gambler, Lucy. Is. Always will be. It’s a disease. She gambled away my medical school money. You can’t imagine how much gone—in a second! I’ve almost paid back the loan I was lucky to get. It’s almost paid back. Then I’ll have more time for you—not so many shifts. I promise.
“Yes, she had a goddamned parrot! Ever since I was little! The damned things live forever. It bit people! It pooped all over the apartment! She was sick, crazy, and stole our life, Lucy. Enough! It’s finished!”
Stabbing lightning; roaring sea.
So when they asked Lucy what she most wanted she said I want my mother’s medical-school loan paid off.
O, that mountain-weight gone!
But no. Instead, rage and blame. Tears. Bargaining. Plain thundering NO! “Lucy. You cannot sell yourself for me.”
Lucy’s own sharp, screaming voice startles her. “That’s all I ever heard you talk about. Money! Now I can give it to you! Doesn’t that make you happy?”
The bowed head. I am so sorry, Lucy. Please forgive me. Take it back. I am getting a lawyer. They did not disclose this to me.
Lucy does not cede.
Her mother finds that the blacksuits have emergency powers under a sweeping security act.
* * *
Lucy is schooled here, in the cold reaches beneath Bluffville, finishing high school in a month and continuing to gallop in many directions at once, feeling a shock of clear delight whenever their interconnections infuse her. She is Good At Music (composition a four-dimensional object). And she is Good At Math and dallies over delicious details of advanced calculus.
She has an online tutor who is blond and cute, with strong blue long-lashed eyes that give her shivers. She daydreams about him. Kisses, hugs, sex. But what is sex? She wants to know. It seems green and pure, a portal to adult. For which she longs: empowerment.
There are a few other specials at the Data Center. She once glimpsed a kid down a long hallway with spiked-up white and purple hair implying piercings and mean tattoos before being whisked past.
Being one, she’s done research: every special’s brain is unique. In fact, the br
ain of everyone is unique, like one’s genetic profile, but the uniqueness of special’s brains is strikingly strange. In the olden days (like, say, before 2000), many of them believed that they truly were the only one of their kind, like the woman who could remember every day of her life in great detail.
The oxymoronic common specialnesses? Dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysphasia: the dysses. Lots of them. Other specialnesses: aphasias, the lacks; autistic, profound; Asperger’s, weird; faint savant; faint eidetic; tetrachromat, yes, synasthaete, wonderful! Though normal, for her, and always.
Her age: that perfect developmental cusp when neurology clicks into brilliant mathematics, physics, art, and insight.
She had been so surprised to learn that her irritation with those around her (she thought they were pretending not to see letters in color, or hear objects) was misplaced. Now she knows for sure the girls she wanted to befriend were for the most part Just. Plain. Stupid.
It helps to think so but sometimes she hears Nanya’s voice, mist-waterfall, a hand tucking her hair behind her ear, a gold-pulsing hug. “Everyone is beautiful, Lucy. Hear hard for their bright sound.”
When Lucy went to big old gold-stone church on Twelfth Street with Nanya, waves of difference stopped holding her under. Hymns were translucent turquoise waves she rode.
After church, Nanya’s parrot, gray parrot, Olu, cursed in broken-machine, springs flying out, metal-crunch as they drank sweet mint tea, still wearing their special African clothes, bright with infinite song. Sometimes Olu said, “Did anybody hear that smell?”
I do. I do.
When small, she did not think this strange.
* * *
After a few hours, Hug-Woman Kelly takes her to brunch in the cafeteria. She crushes Lucy to her large bosom, saying, “Poor dear, they work you so hard.” Lucy can tell that inside Hug-Woman Kelly is as adamantine as the rest, that she does not feel those hugs but plays her part, Nurturer. She puts Yuma Grandma’s face on Hug-Woman’s, knowing that is what they want, and it is fine.
“They got you up at two? Monsters. Have a frappe with that pill. French fries for breakfast? Sure, why not.”
* * *
They began taking her for tests at the brain lab when she was in fourth grade in Mabel’s Falls Elementary. The brain lab was jazzy screens, a new rush of smile faces, and the clunk-whirr of fMRI’s.
How did she infer intent? She couldn’t give them words. Kind of like: there was a golden heart somewhere, where sound and color merged, in that near-far gold-stone church. But on the way, down shouting deep-remembered streets, a fast world needed sorting. The road was steep. The strands her hands grasped burned. When she trained, she often had to loose them and retreat.
They taught her ways to move forward, to keep grasping and searching. The search assumed a rhythm, drew her forward.
Their stiff faces loosened with surprise when she slowed wire-time, satellite-gathered, to particulars. She could listen on a microlevel. She could see what subjects looked like as she watched their minds, speed-built from a blur of references.
She could reliably infer intent much more often than could their most powerful datacrushers.
She was recruited.
She was against Terror. Of course. She swore it.
But it was, still is, more complicated than that.
She craves a path toward Something, and here, she is on that path. She does not know her own goal. She only knows the journey seems familiar, like being in her carseat with her eyes closed and knowing each turn, each changing whirr of tires and each jarring pothole, every tunnel-pressure and its length, a building of flavors until she gets to that longed-for place, that deep meal that Mother will not speak of.
It is more than Nanya, more than Olu, more than a gold-stone church. It is more than a swoop of shadow in moonlit night, Olu machine-cursing as he flies to the stars.
But it is made of them.
* * *
Bills, tedium. But necessary. Invoices, receipts, Internet searches subjects have made build like waves. Some pass beneath her. Some arc, sudden mountains, about to break on steep shores and Click: she says, go see. Go see fast. Where did he go, what did he spend? Tie details in a neat cube and send it up the channels.
Several times a day, she does this.
Tells the blacksuits where. Says show up on their doorstep like you did on mine. Open your powerbadges. Put their heads in helmets, unpack their brains. Interrogate them with physics, with light. Unburden and unwind them.
Make them good or kill them trying.
* * *
On Connecticut Avenue in Washington D.C. it snows hard. Fred Upshaw slips in smooth-soled wing tips, socks soaked, and dodges into a noisy café filled with the usual lunch crowd.
“Someone’s waiting for me—there, I see her.”
Denise Upshaw’s black hair shimmers with melted snowdrops beneath the dropped aluminum cone of light over her table. His phone vibrates; he takes it from his pocket. An unknown number. Disquieting. So many, lately.
Warm scents fill the air—baking bread, tomato soup. Brittle clink of glasses; he sees some lunch martinis on tables, wishes for one, forgoes the wish.
“Hi—sorry I’m late!”
“Hey! What about this weather? But I love snow!” Her smile is quick and lovely.
“I don’t. It’s messy. Have you decided?”
The waiter appears. “Take your order?”
Fred looks at him twice. “Are you new?”
“Did you see today’s specials on the board? We have—“
“I’ll have the soup. A bowl,” she says, cutting in. “And hot chocolate. You have hot chocolate?”
“I’ll check.”
Denise dimples at Fred. “I have something to tell you.”
* * *
Why do they want Lucy? Why is she better than Yoda? She is not sure. Hug-Woman mumbled something about “You pass the Turing Test” one time when she asked. She knows what that is. She just does not know why it is better than being a computer.
* * *
Green: crackling/burning plastic. Sharp.
Blue: Oddly, hot. Like red for others. A moibus.
Yellow: Too far to ever go.
Purple: Taste of blood in her mouth. A cut on her finger when she was crawling and found a knife on the kitchen floor and her brain was defining sensory paths, the paths that were never pruned? Doesn’t matter.
Red: A glimpse of trees overhead.
White: The Beatles: Love, Love, Love.
Orange: Play. Wild play. Sleek dogs run through gold autumn fields. Nothing better.
Black: Braincold.
These colors: so rudimentary.
But the beginnings of an infinite alphabet. And no one else will ever read the words.
* * *
?
Why do you keep bothering me? All right. I was saying “with liberty and justice for all” with my hand over my heart when Mr. Thompson came to the classroom door.
Seriously.
That was the first time I rode in a limo. It was black inside; braincold. Mr. Burly Bumpnose sat next to me in the back and Ms. Painful Gamboge Yellow was in the front seat. All in all, they were sharp shouts mixed with bibble and they did not even move or smile or speak. I’m trying to be plain but it is hard. I really have to slow down and … No offense, but talking to other people is like talking to dogs or cats. I would rather showbrain with parrots. We are more alike. No one hears unless I talk in baby steps. Like, for instance, do you know what lake pigments sound like? Or even look like? Supreme Alternate Rainbow Ornette Coleman. Sure, sometimes I’m just pulling your leg. The plainest day for most people is my carnival, apparently. Sometimes it hurts.
What? Don’t ask me about parrots again. I was just making that up. LOL. Parrots are cool, aren’t they? Really, really smart. And they live a long time.
No, not really. I’ve never met one. Just read about them. Leave me alone.
Mouse click slows change. She tries to pinpoint. I
nterlocutor slips away.
Which surprises her: a limit to what she can do.
* * *
Green song-couple. Her side blue, his yellow. Yearning a billisecond pause. She says “Fred, we’re going to have a baby.”
Brainyank. Burnvoice: “What?”
She skims the edge of intent, then drinks it; finds it good. She follows the trail of surmise and leaps backward and finds the false taste planted, rotten and retch-making as rotting meat.
She walks into a vortex and it is quiet in the middle. She hides from her handlers, realizing, They’re okay. They are so okay it hurts, Fred and Denise Upshaw.
* * *
She wakes in a cot in the sleeping room, and they know the instant she does so. How long has she been here? She doesn’t remember leaving her cubicle.
“Sorry,” says Hug-Woman, grabbing her hand and pulling her to the bathroom. “Orange alert.” The color of resolution, when all is made right. The tonic chord. The perfect meal. Release; the path to truth; glory.
They shouldn’t remind her of the possibility; should not give her the trumpet blare. They know this, but it seems too complicated for any one handler to remember.
Ice-arrows of shower barely wake her.
But the pill does.
* * *
The wires jerk her to a traffic camera. Upshaw’s car veers into a lamppost. She skids down the path to the remote computer controlling his steering wheel: the fleeting wisp of 0’s and 1’s that almost kill him. Denise. The baby she just told him about.
Why?
She tastes something and chases the taste like a gazelle.
The blue moibus pulls her onboard. It sears her, brings her back to her cubicle. “Hey!” Tight hands on her shoulders. Slaps. “Stop screaming! Stop it!” Blur eyes of MentorEnemyWoman. Pretend-black-sooth; inside swirl enemy colors. Fake blonde hair brushing Lucy’s face. “You will report this as a satisfactory outcome. A success. You will redo your previous assessment.”
“But I told you! They are not terrorists.” Lucy shakes her head so violently that her dreads pelt the woman’s face. “ItoldyouItoldyouItoldyou they are all right! They are…”