Cyberweb

by Lisa Mason

  Carly turns west at the corner of Broadway. An old Chinese woman clad in the padded jacket, black pajamas, and rubber thongs her peasant ancestors generations ago would have worn, jabbers obscenities at an immaculate traffic controller who is keying in statistics onto its polished chrome chestboard. The traffic controller starts, turns its precise triangular faceplace, and beeps with polite modulation, “Excuse me, madam.”

  Carly glances back. Pr. Spinner is bitching and moaning as usual about her lousy housing, Saint Download twitters and pings at the prober. For the thousandth time, Carly wonders whether she should dump Spinner, strike out on her own. And for the thousandth time, she decides no. For every deficiency she can name in the prober, she can think of a virtue, sometimes two. She needs good old Spin. At least for a little while longer.

  She pauses, dizzy. Everything suddenly whirling. Sickness in her gut. She needs Spinner to see her through her recovery from cram.

  Cram, cocaine, knockerblocker, barbiturates, blue moon, whiskey, marijuana, nicotine, caffeine, heroine—drugs are everywhere, too, like mobile AI entities and automobiles. Most drugs are legal and registered. You have to declare your habits, submit to regulations, pay steep user taxes. And cram? Cram isn’t on the registered list, but anyone can score it. A lot of pro linkers do. Cram gives link the edge, makes hypertime bearable, tweaks telespace. Till it hooks you and reels you in, flopping and gasping, and flings you out again to drown.

  It was her old mentor, D. Wolfe, who showed how cram gave link the edge. Cram had killed Wolfe. Cram had nearly killed her.

  Carly and cram are through. She doesn’t need cram for the edge anymore. She has something superior now. She has hyperlink capability.

  She has the Arachne.

  * * *

  Things are jumping at the YinYang Club, but then things usually are. Above the purple-painted door, a holoid-threaded neoplastic bas-relief metamorphoses through all the positions of the Kama Sutra. Plum incense infused with opium smoke wafts through the air. Cambodian bells gong, while the latest trash rock blares over the sound system. Juiceheads shriek in the shock gallery in back. The noontime regulars are getting rowdy. The house bimbobot is hustling, dressed in a shabby tuxedo, a bowler hat, an elaborately curled mustache pasted on his/her faceplace.

  “You never been no pro-link mediator,” sneers the drunk at the bar. He’s guzzling uncooked blue moon, straight up. His breath smells like a dirty drain.

  Carly shrugs, sipping house wine. Sashi, the star stripper of the YinYang Club, is tending bar before her set. Her face sparkles with aquamarine jewel-powders. Sashi doesn’t take bootleg softbucks, but she gives Carly wine when the boss isn’t around and puts her tab on an unmarked account when he is. Sashi’s only problem is that she hates tending bar. Sashi would rather dance.

  “Can’t back it up, huh?” persists the drunk, “If you’re some kinda hotshot pro linker, where’s your neckjack, huh?”

  Carly smiles, but her eyes are cold. When she was a pro linker, she would have never spoken to a creep like this, let alone sat next to him at a bar. But his expensive, if ill-cut, suit cabled with biofeed and leather shoes humming with air cushions means he may have a credit disk or two in his pockets. Maybe registered drugs, unthreaded money. Loot and trade with no identification tracing the user every time value changes hands. That’s one trick to surviving on the street without Data Control finding her and rounding her up before she can get her hyperlink in shape. Not an easy trick. The exchange of anylegal value is accounted for, traced, and regulated down to the last obsessive softbuck.

  “Wanna see?”she whispers. The drunk practically drools. Sashi rolls her eyes. Carly winks. “Help yourself,” she says to the drunk. “Take a look.”

  She scoops her hair aside, bends over his lap, bares her neck. The cortical wiring and the housing are clean, her flesh chiseled like carved marble.

  The drunk gawks. Sashi points out features of the morphing, an anatomical tour guide. “See, that’s the hardware goes right into her skull, innit purty? An’ that’s the wetware that goes down her spine.”

  Carly slides a slim hand into his pocket. Finds a credit disk, a billfold, some other things she can’t identify. She leaves the tiny cube containing his travel plans, but palms the rest into her own pocket.

  “I’ll be gob-swapped,” says the drunk, flinging another shot of blue moon into the back of his throat. Carly doesn’t know if Sashi spiked it or if the drunk has reached his limit—which isn’t hard with uncooked blue moon—but he slumps over the bar and passes out.

  A bouncer chatting with Pr. Spinner and Saint Download slides over, dumps the drunk in its cart, navigates him out the door of the YinYang Club. The bouncer piles him into a smart taxi on Broadway. The taxi scans his travel plans, speeds away.

  Sashi shakes her head. “You crazy, girl. Lucky he’s mooned. Won’t remember a thing. Wake up at his next hotel, blame the taxi.”

  Carly pulls out five hundred in unthreaded bills, three credit disks, five joints of Acapulco Gold, a smart Cross pen, and a baggie of chocolate-covered Columbian coffee beans. Shame strikes her. Guilt tugs at her conscience. Humiliation washes over her. Carly Quester, the fast-track kid, remorphed at five years old, schooled and trained for twenty years. On her way to a legitimate telespace career, a professional position, prospective wealth neatly accounted for. Prestige. Privilege. All that.

  And she’s picking pockets of drunks in a Broadway bar?

  What would her father, Sam Quester, think? A vision of him, long dead, a sight still painful to her, rises up before her eyes. His telelink stolen in a recreational link. He’d wanted the best for her. Sacrificed for her.

  She tosses a credit disk at Sashi. “Good citizen that I am.” Tosses a hundred-dollar bill over the bar, too.

  Sashi takes the bill, returns four paper twenties in change. “You need it more ‘n’ me, kid. I gotta good gig here.”

  “Try a bean?” Carly offers. Sashi declines, but Carly takes one from the baggie, chews it. “They tweak the chocolate, too. Get you high as the sky.”

  She chews and she swallows the shame, the guilt, the humiliation. The coffee bean makes her blood boil. A jolt of rage rockets through her. Dad, she tells the memory of her father, they set me up.

  She never asked for an archetype to haunt her telelink. An archetype—an anomaly in telespace manifesting spontaneously. Erratic neural-electric energy. A fragment of human program.

  For Carly, a nightmare that had crashed her telelink during her first solo appearance in a Venue. The Arbiter had been enraged. She’d delayed his Venue by five seconds.

  Data Control hadn’t understood what was happening to her. Why she had spontaneously crashed, and why a terrifying vision—the vision of a spider—had gripped her during her blackouts.

  But did Data Control help her? Did Data Control give her the benefit of the doubt? No, Data Control hadn’t believed her. Data Control had blamed her. And now Data Control is tracking her down.

  Carly’s certification to public telespace was suspended. Her career as a telespace mediator indefinitely stalled till the medcenter sengine could verify she was cured of the bug taking her telelink down.

  And did the medcenter sengine help her? No, the medcenter sengine was a terrifying AI entity who didn’t give a damn about anyone or anything, human or nonhuman, not even Data Control.

  Carly would never forget that whispering synthy voice while a medcenter bioscan vivisected her.

  But after application of the latest med-tech, the medcenter sengine couldn’t identify the problem, either. The medcenter sengine declined to recertify her telelink, refused to let her to back to her mediator practice till she’d undergone probe therapy.

  The medcenter sengine had referred her to one Pr. Spinner, a licensed standalone AI entity with an office in the college town of Berkeley. The entity was called a perimeter prober. Her specialty was probing human telelink for glitches in their programming. To find a cure for the unidentified problem. The an
omaly, is how they came to refer to it. And Pr. Spinner had probed her. Oh, good old Spin had probed Carly.

  A passel of Korean recyclers on their break amble into the YinYang Club, clanging their shovels, radiating toxic waste. Pr. Spinner and Saint Download retreat to the service elevator in the back and park there, swiveling their eyespots unhappily.

  Sashi wiggles her fingers for a chocolate coffee bean. “That true, anyway?’ she says, pouring Carly another round in trade. Sashi is the perfect bartender. A juicehead, she never drinks. She plugs electricity into the pleasure center of her brain. She gets what she wants in the shock gallery at the back of the YinYang Club, where rows of juiceheads strap up, plug in, and scream with ecstasy. Sashi’s eyes glitter like twin tiny spotlights above the aquamarine gleam of her jewel-powders. “You were like, some kinda big-deal telespace mediator? I mean, I seen your hardware with my own eyes and all, but . . .”

  “Yep,” Carly says, sliding wine around the caffeine kick. “Ava & Rice. Eight Embarcadero. Twenty-second floor. Stealing telespace property from a little old lady, the property’s rightful owner. Corrupt. Once you cross over the divide into corruption, there’s no turning back. I turned back.”

  A steep price she’s paid for turning back. And damn it anyway, Carly’s not some street tough. Not a gangstah girl. Not a digger, with her face stained walnut, her body tattooed with glyphs, running wild with a tribe on the streets, refusing to participate in society’s tech-mech like a neo-Luddite gone mad. Not even a pickpocket or a thief, not really—at least she doesn’t see herself that way. No, no, no. She never asked for any of this.

  She tried to stay true to her ideals.

  Now she’s trying to survive.

  “There more to the story?” Sashi says.

  “It’s a strange, sad story,” Carly warns.

  “I’m listenin’.”

  Pr. Spinner had probed her twice, releasing psychic ghosts so painful that—for comfort, to keep going—Carly had turned to D. Wolfe—mentor? lover? traitor?—and to cram. By the third probe, Carly’s telelink perimeters were badly damaged. And in that awful third probe, she and the prober found it.

  Found the spider haunting her telelink. Found the archetype of Arachne.

  “What about Spinner?” Sashi leans over the bar. “She’s a piece of work, innit she? A real antique.”

  “Good old Spin.” Carly sighs.

  At first, the prober had been unremittingly hostile. The prober had a grudge against humanity for creating an AI entity like her. For making Spin smart, self-aware, conscious, then relegating her to the subclass in which all artificial intelligence entities labored.

  Pr. Spinner especially had a grudge against Carly. Spin was an antique fembot—rusty, poorly designed, not nice to look at—and Carly was beautiful. Carly was a genny, a genetically engineered person. Even disheveled, her hair was copper-gold, her big eyes green, her lash implants an ebony fan over each eye. And Carly was a human being. Flesh-and-blood, Spinner calls her. A jelly brain. A blood worm. A shit tube. Yet Carly was effortlessly blessed with biological programming so sublime even the most sophisticated AI could never match it.

  “Spinner was jealous,” Carly says. “She could have killed me. More than anything, Spinner wanted that archetype. Wanted to rip the neural fragment right out of my telelink, download it into her own database.”

  “But why?” Sashi wrinkles her brow.

  “To experience the human metaprogram.” Carly shrugs. “I guess we privileged human beings take for granted what the less privileged AI covet. I guess that’s the way of the world.”

  “But Spinner didn’t do it? Didn’t rip you off?”

  Carly grins. “No, she didn’t.”

  Good old Spin couldn’t bring herself to destroy Carly Quester. In the end, her oath to humanity every AI is programmed with overrode the prober’s covetousness. Spinner couldn’t steal the spider out of Carly’s telelink, leave her brain-dead, disengaged in telespace. No, instead Spinner helped Carly confront the Arachne. The prober showed her that the spider—predator, poisonous vermin—was also a creator, a weaver of webs. And the Arachne had a deeper meaning. The spider was a goddess figure from ancient myth and history. The spider was powerful in more ways than one.

  “Pr. Spinner showed me how this . . . thing, this archetype, this metaprogram I never wanted in the first place, was in fact a great gift. Like . . . a new direction for human telelink. I was cursed with this gift, but I was also blessed. Anyway”—Carly empties her wine, slaps her hand over the mouth of the glass—“anyway, it turns out I can’t get rid of the thing. Not even if I wanted to. I’ve become what Spin calls a hyperlink. Isn’t that a kick?”

  “So that’s why Data Control is lookin’ for ya?” Sashi’s question seems innocent.

  But you can never tell. Carly hates this! I’m not some street tough, Dad. They set me up. She got stiffed by Data Control. Now she has to figure how to get unstiffed so she can work in public telespace again.

  Telespace—the cool, clean feel of public telespace. Linking into telespace is mega. So fine in the mind. The only way to think, to move, to be. Where she belongs. Carly hates being barred from public telespace. Spinner’s private bootleg telespace, generated off the prober’s double-jacked chair, cannot compare.

  She must work in public telespace again. Carly must figure out how to get back on the fast-track so she can get on with her life.

  “Who’s lookin’ for me?” Carly pockets the four twenties, slips off the stool. “Hey, I’m on vacation for the summer.”

  “For the fall, winter, and spring, too?” Sashi says. A rock ‘n’ roll riff signals the start of Sashi’s act. The crowd jostles and shouts, bangs their glasses on tabletops. Impatient for the fabulous Sashi to strut her stuff.

  Carly laughs. “Maybe forever.”

  2

  At the YinYang Club

  “My flesh-and-blood, mine,” Pr. Spinner mutters as she and Saint Download wait at the service elevator for Carly Quester. Spin cringes beneath blood-colored strobe lights throbbing like a pulse in the ceiling. The Korean recyclers are throwing bottles and ashtrays at each other, two drunks have mooned out, the hottest act on Broadway is quitting her post at the bar to climb up onto the stage and dance, and it is barely past noon on a Wednesday.

  Oh, yes, the jelly brain got her in this predicament. And, indeed, the jelly brain is in her debt. Carly owes her life and her dubious freedom to the one and only Pr. Spinner. Teh! She is a Fifty-seven fembot with fully mobilized housing, an enculturated standalone AI entity fully recognized by the University of California Telespace Studies as a perimeter prober. With a doctorate degree, cum laude, thank you very much. Good old Spin, that’s what the woman calls her these days. Oh, indeed, Carly Quester had better be polite.

  What a time they’ve had. Despite her rusty shoulder ridges and wobbly foot rollers, those were Spinner’s glory days. Her own little office on Telegraph Avenue in the heart of The People’s Republic of Cool. Probe patient referrals from the medcenter sengine, whose username—Spinner has since learned—is R-X. The woman isn’t the only human whose professional career has been ruined by R-X.

  Spinner twitches with agitation. Ah yes, the glory days, when she probed Carly’s damaged perimeters for the glitch in her telelink program that had mysteriously crashed her in the middle of a Venue. Spinner was the one in control when the woman wept over whether her telespace practice was ethical or not. Spinner was the one who knew more about archetypes and human metaprogram than this human being. Spinner was the one, teh!

  Now everything is turned upside-down, and good old Spin isn’t in control anymore. They’re on the run. Is it any wonder good old Spin clings to the flesh-and-blood? For Carly is Spinner’s ace, the card up her sleeve, her ticket out of this predicament. Carly Quester is a human being with legal rights in this society. Pr. Spinner has no rights, no defense at all. Data Control doesn’t execute the flesh-and-blood for telespace crimes. But they think nothing of terminating a
n artificial intelligence entity.

  Upside down. Everything turned upside down.

  Spinner doesn’t like seeing Carly Quester holding up bank tellers in broad gridlock, hiding in lockbox Bins, picking a drunk’s pockets. It’s embarrassing. Not to mention likely to compound their already serious difficulties with Data Control. This shabby existence is not why she’d stolen Carly Quester from the suspiciously greedy jaws of R-X, that cockroach of a sengine squatting in its posh medcenter. Indeed, not for this.

  Pr. Spinner observes that the club’s bimbobot has changed out of the tuxedo. Now his/her chrome curves are looped with glittering pink boas. S/he sidles up to a sweating gambler punching bets into an online blackjack game. The other players are in Los Vegas, New York, Beijing—who knows? The bimbobot peers over the gambler’s shoulder, clicking his/her stainless steel fingernails absentmindedly next to the monitor. On screen, the gambler’s cards pop up in a foreground window. The gambler studies his hand. He pays the bimbobot no attention.

  Click, clickety. Is that random? The bimbobot’s tapping fingernails? Spinner bets not, and Spinner is not a gambling bot. Click . . . clickety click click click. Does the gambler have a clue? Spinner bets not, etcetera. Teep! The gambler loses, cursing as the casino sengine debits his credit disk, ejects it. He orders another drink, another hand, shoves his disk back in the slot. The bimbobot drifts away, clicking her/his nails on a chrome midriff, rolling pumped-up hip bumps at a couple of boisterous military guys at the bar.

  The YinYang Club, teh! The place is a hustle, a sham, a sinkhole of perversity. Bimbobots writhe next to human beings on blue-lit stages, perform strange acrobatics, depict acts of sex and destruction. Lurid holoids slink across every satin wall. Servos work the hooker stalls, hunker in grubby shadows next to the shock gallery. The bar dispenses every kind of registered drug at the flash of a citizen’s disk, and every unregistered synthy, too. The crude rock ’n’ roll makes Spinner’s headpiece rattle.