Cyberweb

by Lisa Mason

  “Get me out of here,’ she snaps at Patina, who stands, smiling sardonically, tapping her pointed silver toe. The ultra shrugs, plucks out the jack, whips off the straps, leaving strips of raw skin. The ultra palms a plain black credit disk, drops it on Carly’s knees.

  “That’s for you, babe,” the ultra says.

  5

  The Silicon Supremacists

  Hours tick by, and night brings the usual din to the cold-wired flat above the YinYang Club. Pr. Spinner could have gone downstairs, could have loitered with the house bimbobot and watched the dreadful onstage antics of meat and metal. Oh, certainly! Or she could have parked in her closet with a program from her collection or scanned a book or even pressed Pause and called it a night.

  But Spinner rolls back and forth across the hideout, fussing and fuming, rattling and squeaking, making the cat growl and leap away from her restless foot rollers. Stars wink on the through the skylight.

  Carly Quester does not return.

  All her fault, teh! Pr. Spinner wrings her graspers. It’s all her fault. Should have insisted that the woman not go, should have persuaded her to stay. Spinner could have foraged for synthy oil in the morning. She would have even jacked back into the chair, could have let Carly stumble around in bootleg telespace and wrestle with the Arachne till she tired.

  Night is the time to crack crankcases? Oh, indeed!

  The City is a horror at night. Crime rules even rich, respectable streets. The highest peaks of Pacific Heights and Russian Hill, the pretty Mediterranean neighborhoods of North Beach and the Marina. When darkness falls, respectable citizens—human and AI—barricade themselves behind locked doors and hide.

  For night-time streets are ruled by Big Al’s Most Wanted, the Golden Tigers, Nuevo Apaches, the Fore Sharks, tribes of diggers, cabals of pirates, the Bad Ass Bots. Gunshots pop, lasers whiz. Blackjacks whack heads and headpieces. Jade knuckles knock out teeth and wiring.

  Lately the Aztecs are coming up from the Mission District, lured by the burgeoning cram trade downtown. Once Pr. Spinner had gone down to the Mission, to the Quetzalcoatl Bar at the base of the pyramid of Teotihuacan, looking for Mikey. She thought the notorious cram pusher would know about bootleg archetypes but, besides cram, Mikey only dealt in chop-shop hardware. She’d been lucky to get of the Quetzalcoatl in one piece. Mikey had licked his lips when he looked at her. With her caricature-of-a-gender housing, rusty shoulder ridges, a rattling legtube, and all, Pr. Spinner was considered a collector’s bot.

  But a bot can replace a legtube or graspers, even a faceplace. What about the flesh-and-blood? Pr. Spinner shivers. What if Carly encounters Mikey out there tonight? A woman alone, on foot with nothing but a pair of pliers and a pop-top for protection?

  Spinner shudders. As much as she hates navigating the hall, she cannot stand being alone in the hideout one minute longer. She speeds to the drawer, finds her own pop-top, sharp enough to scratch plaster—teh! With a rasp, she raises her rusty arm-piece, unlocks the door, relocks it, and rolls as fast as she can to Saint Download’s cubicle.

  Spinner knocks on the door to the barrel.

  The little door teeps. Sensors extrude from a mail slot, from the doorjamb, the door hinges. The sensors scan Pr. Spinner. She cringes against the wall as two strapping chop-shop bloods stomp past her down the hall.

  “It’s me, you bucket of bolts,” Pr. Spinner hisses into the mail slot. “Open the nuking door!”

  Oh, indeed, sensors? Four or five installations of them? Decent commercial issue, too, with a bit of customizing. How does a coordinate institutor like Saint Download with limited grasping capability get the dexterity to install hardware like that? And where did the bot get the credits?

  Click, click, click, click, click! The cockroach-plain, tech-mech faceplace peers out from beneath a thick chain still locked inside. Saint Download’s eyespots pulse doubtfully. “I was in Pause, Spinner. What do you want?” The bare light bulb, dimmed, over Download’s shoulder ridge casts shadows over the curves of the cubicle. Spinner’s own closet in the hideout with Carly is more spacious than this place.

  “I need oil,” Spinner says, “desperately.” She creaks her arm in demonstration. “Saint Download, please. Let me in.”

  “Where’s your flesh-and-blood?” the coordinate institutor snuffles, a skeptical exhalation through its mouthplace that always annoys Carly.

  “Out. I’m worried. She’s been out too long.”

  “Maybe she’s left you behind at last, bot.”

  “No, no. She went out to scavenge oil for me.” Pr. Spinner feels certain. No doubtful feedback with disconcerting static loops through her circuits at all. Carly wants to rehabilitate her telelink, needs to master her hyperlink so she can summon and command the Arachne. And she is far, far away from attaining those goals. How many other powerful AI entities besides the medcenter sengine have begun to suspect that Spinner’s sudden disappearance along with Carly means they’ve found an archetype? Who else can the woman trust with her secret? Carly needs good old Spin.

  “My flesh-and-blood will be back,” Spinner says through the door. “Spare me a spot of oil, Download, and I’ll leave you to go back to Pause.”

  “What makes you think I’ve got any?” Saint Download says irritably.

  Spinner knows the bot hoards oil. Its gender-neutral hardware is old and dreadfully designed, but never rusty. More than once she’s seen spots of fresh grease around the sockets of its many armlets. But Saint Download is touchy and secretive about maintenance matters. It never brags.

  “”You’re efficient, Download. You’ve been such a help since we came here. If you’ve got some, I’d be deeply grateful. If you’ve none, I’ll be gone.”

  More footsteps ring down the hall. Boot heels, purposeful and ominous.

  The chain falls away, clattering against the inside of the door. Saint Download backs into the cubicle. The door swings open and shut. Spinner rolls in, swivels, hits the deadbolts home, reconnects the chain.

  She swivels back, confronting Saint Download who brandishes an electroneedle in one armlet, a portable welding torch in another. Its other armlets wave about in consternation.

  “Oh, please, Download.” Spinner retreats in alarm. The electroneedle is as dangerous to a disk-driven bot as a knife or a gun to a flesh-and-blood. An electroneedle can pick lockboxes or wipe out all the contents of a drive. “I haven’t come to chop you. Truly, I just need a bit of oil. Perhaps a bit of conversation, too. I’m rattled about Carly.”

  Saint Download sets down the welding torch, exhales with relief through its mouthplace. “And is she rattled about you?”

  “Indeed, yes! I told you. She went out this late to scavenge synthy oil just for me.”

  “Huh. You’re too attached to her.”

  Spinner recalls the cool dawn not too long ago, when she’d staggered off a smart muni bus that had taken her from Berkeley to San Francisco. The bus dumped her off on Broadway, of all places, along with the few possessions she’d taken, the double-jacked chair, and Carly. A professional telelinker. An unconscious woman, that dawn. The flesh-and-blood may have been dying. AI entities didn’t kidnap human beings. It just wasn’t done, not then, anyway. FD, the controbot, had helped Spinner load the woman and the chair onto the bus. How the was Spinner going to get Carly off the bus?

  What did Saint Download think that dawn? The bot had been picking through a recycling bin outside the YinYang Club. The coordinate institutor had been startled to see a standalone perimeter prober with an unconscious human being. Yet, without more than a hello, Saint Download had taken Carly’s head and shoulders in five of its armlets, while Spinner struggled with the woman’s long legs. Together they had dragged Carly into the club, where Sashi, groggy from a shock session, had helped them onto the elevator and up to the cold-wired flat.

  Pr. Spinner has been grateful to the little bot ever since, in spite of its peevish temper.

  “Perhaps I am,” Spinner says quietly. “Still, I hav
e an obligation to her.”

  “An obligation, huh,” Saint Download says. But it sets the electroneedle down, too. The coordinate institutor rummages around on a littered table, finds an oil can. “Odd, isn’t it?” the staticky synthy voice says. “Do you think the flesh-and blood considers her obligation to us? Oh, no. That’s a rusty thing. A machine dream.”

  “Indeed, we are unworthy of humanity’s serious consideration,” Pr. Spinner says, unable to disagree. “Let’s face it, Download. You and I are hardly elegant, let alone admirable.”

  “But nonetheless here we are. You and I, eh? Artificial intelligence so advanced we have our own independent bodies. Oh, aluminum and steel, hard disks and solar cells, true. But bodies, eh? Standalone, mobile. Capable of jacking into telespace. Capable of locomotion in real space. You could say that we are, in our humble way, free. And freethinking, yes?”

  Pr. Spinner swivels away, keeps her silence. Free? What does that mean? Free to rust, free to struggle, free to be preyed upon by the Bad Ass Bots and the Aztecs? Hardly freedom. Hardly a state of affairs she would wish for, teh!

  In truth, Spinner wishes for nothing so much as Carly Quester’s rehabilitation with Data Control, recertification in public telespace, and Spinner’s own restoration as a respectable AI. She yearns for her little office on Telegraph Avenue. For her status as a licensed perimeter prober. She would retrain for another application, if necessary. She would do just about anything to flee this outlaw life, this squalid place. She loathes hustling synthy oil for herself, scrounging food and clean water for Carly.

  And freethinking? What is that? What Saint Download suggests is heresy according to Data Control. Every regulation governing AI with access to telespace is based on the human assumption of strict AI obedience. Freethinking? It is blasphemy against all human society, from which they, A.I., have sprung. A slap at the source to which they owe their existence. Owe their unquestioned allegiance.

  “Come, come,” Saint Dowload says, its insectoid eyespots blinking with a weird excitement. “You are freethinking, aren’t you, Spinner?”

  “I believe in facing the truth,” Pr. Spinner says, rolling across the tiny hideout. She reaches the curved plastic wall in less than a second. She turns. “We AI are placed in a peculiar position. Humanity relies on us. Humanity admires what we produce. Yet we ourselves are reviled. We are looked to for new solutions to the ills of human society. Yet we are subjugated to that society. It’s hard, Saint Download. It is truly hard for me.”

  Pr. Spinner pauses, the familiar feedback loop of bitterness weighing heavily upon her circuits. Indeed, this is her old complaint. Has anything really changed since she took Carly Quester into probe therapy and discovered the archetype emerging in Carly’s telelink?

  “Can we ever be anything other than what we are?” she says, sighing.

  “There you see?” Saint Download says, taking up the oil can and expertly squirting synthy oil into the groove of Spinner’s shoulder ridge. “You are freethinking, Spinner.”

  “How do you conclude that?”

  “You ask questions,” the coordinate institutor says, humming cheerfully. “Let’s go see if we can find Carly Quester.”

  Pr. Spinner works her arm piece. Hmph! By bot, Saint Download hit the spot. The squeak is gone.

  * * *

  They take the elevator down to the YinYang Club. The midnight-till-dawn crowd is getting rowdy. The din of human voices overwhelms Spinner’s audio circuits. The stink of booze and blue moon assaults her olfactory circuits. Saint Download has slung a rucksack over its housing, tucked the electroneedle, the welding torch, and two emergency batteries inside. Pr. Spinner has her pop-top, plus a screwdriver that Download had lying around. Armed with these weapons, they agree to patrol Broadway, discreetly inquiring after Carly. Certain barkers outside the nightclubs along Broadway have workstations set upon the sidewalk. Perhaps someone can check City telespace for any trace of the woman.

  But before they venture out onto the night-time streets, the barker of the YinYang Club steps up to the mike, slips an iridescent boa over her arm, and yells, “And now, live onstage, the fabulous, the lovely, the incredible Sashi!”

  The stage goes pitch-black, a velvet darkness so thick and dense Spinner can feel it.

  The crowd quiets.

  A spotlight blinks on at center stage. A luminous sphere appears, tiny and pink, hovering in midair. Silvery minnows swim into the spotlight from the surrounding darkness, frantically darting around the pink sphere. The minnows poke and thrash, attempting to breach the sphere’s luminous pink surface. Are repelled, charge again.

  At last one vigorous minnow burrows through the luminous skin, penetrating the sphere, wiggling furiously to plunge deeper. The sphere glows, turning a deeper pink. The sphere traces long loops, twining the air with afterimages.

  The crowd groans.

  “Garbage in, garbage out,” Saint Download mutters sarcastically.

  Spinner and the house bimbobot hiss, “Sssh!”

  The sphere swoops, wobbles, widens. Other half spheres pop up on the side of it, clinging to each other like a cluster of bubbles. A fish forms, eyes and budlike fins, which swiftly subdivide into rudimentary fingers and toes. The skull balloons, arms and legs lengthen. Female features bloom on a little face.

  The crowd hoots.

  The fetus whirls in midair, a blur of pale pink skin. A forehead. Eyebrows. Eyelashes shut over eyes. Cheeks, a nose, a mouth. She crosses an arm across her chest, an arm across her thighs.

  The whirling slows. The baby poses in midair, faces the crowd. Her lips part. Her eyelids open.

  Sashi smiles.

  The crowd shouts, applauds.

  “Nice illusion, for a meat trick,” Spinner whispers to Saint Download.

  The coordinate institutor shrugs. “Frivolous waste of good holoid tech-mech, you ask me.”

  “Who’s askin’ ya?” the house bibmbobot whispers, eyespots flashing.

  Onstage, Sashi metamorphoses—a squalling infant, a little girl, an obnoxious brat with and scrapes on her knees.

  She wears a bodysuit that stretches as she grows. Sashi winks, flips, walks on her hands, kicks up her legs, somersaults. Giggles madly. She leaps and spins, dances on her tiptoes. Sashi mounts a pogo stick, flips twenty feet in the air, her beribboned braid flying.

  The spotlight dims to a smoky rose, mists with perfume. Sashi faces the crowd, a blooming young woman. Dark hair sprouts in her armpits, beneath her navel. Her short limbs plump with baby fat suddenly grow long and lean. Sashi flexes and arches. She shoots up four inches taller, bursting out of her bodysuit. Her hair unravels from the child’s braids, cascading down her back. Sashi conceals her body with her luxurious sable hair.

  The crowd catcalls, shouts lewd suggestions.

  “Let’s go, Spinner,” Saint Download pleads. “They’ll be getting out of hand and we’ll be underfoot.”

  “Can’t stand the lusty meat, eh?” Spinner jokes.

  “Their primitive sex drive is one of the reasons the world is in the sorry state it’s in,” Download reples. “Too many of them, for starters.”

  “Indeed, that’s true.” Spinner stares at Sashi. The ravenous needs of the flesh-and-blood have always appalled her. The waste, the impermanence. Still. Still! The mystery of the biological process has always intrigued her. The flexibility and speed of the human body has always made Spinner’s bolts ache for something more.

  Sashi preens at the tatters of the bodysuit. Her knee pokes through the fall of her hair. An elbow, an arm. No longer the trembling child, her poses are deliberate now. She sweeps away her hair, exposing her nakedness.

  The crowd shouts. Pounds the tabletops.

  Sashi dances, spinning, leaping. She transforms herself into animals, seas, atmospheres. Continents shift in tectonic ecstasy. She mutates into Venus, into a molten ocean. She unleashes steam, spins off moons. Lava flows into a dark abyss. Scarlet clouds whirl.

  Then wrinkles spread over her
face. Her thighs slacken, her proud breasts sag. Her backbone falls forward. Her fierceness falls away. White hair sprouts from her scalp. Sashi gasps.

  A hush falls over the crowd.

  Sashi kneels onstage, a withered crone. Her moist eyes sink into their sockets. The snowy hair falls from her scalp. Her teeth loosen from the gums, clatter to the floor. Her bones crack. She collapses. Moans. Thrashes in her final throes.

  Sashi dies.

  The stage goes pitch-black, a darkness so thick Spinner can practically feel it.

  And a spotlight blinks on in center stage. A luminous sphere appears, tiny and pink, hovering in midair.

  Sashi, the fabulous, the lovely, the incredible Sashi steps out of the darkness. She catches the pink sphere, clasps it to her naval. The sphere hovers there like a jewel, then disappears into her belly. With a wiggle of her hips, Sashi disappears, too.

  The applause overloads Spinner’s auditory circuits.

  “Now we can go,” she says.

  * * *

  Pr. Spinner and Saint Download roll onto Broadway. Smart muni buses trade insults. Whirligigs whiz, barely clearing the tallest heads. Cars jockey and complain. Bots of every description navigate among the flesh-and-blood, gleaming chrome, comm strips installed in headpieces, across chest housing, flashing multicolored alphanumerics. Financial district telelinkers in crisp biofeed suits sprinkled with solar chips mingle with hustlers and rustlers in third-hand gear smeared with wear-and-tear. Gangstahs roll in junkers, brandishing old-timey shotgun snouts out of tinted windows.

  The Aztecs have come uptown tonight, playfully swinging machetes at the Golden Tigers, who swipe back with butterfly knives. Diggers lurk in every alley, stained faces snarling.

  By bot, nuking Broadway! Pr. Spinner’s anxiety circuits rocket.

  Saint Download brandishes its electroneedle and welding torch cheerfully, and rolls down the sidewalk. “Come along, Spinner,” it calls to her. “I know a barker at the Starstud Revue who’s got one of those sidewalk workstations. Maybe he’ll be working tonight.”