by Lisa Mason
Ouija’s heart grows tighter. “My sage, I serve my tribe, as ever and always. I must hunt and find booty. I must keep our children from the shelters where the Glass Land will steal our souls. I must watch for signs and prophesies. I must listen to mighty Whoosh. I cannot watch this genny woman. I hunt not with linkers.”
“She must be watched,” Louie Zoo says sternly. He seems to grow brighter, as though lit by a fire within. He focuses his watery eyes on Ouija. The sage seldom uses the glance of power and Ouija feels a piercing. Feels the sage’s soul boring into his soul. “You must take your ears where there are no ears. You must take your eyes where there are no eyes. You must watch her.”
Ouija likes not the sound of this. He bristles. “For whom must I do this watching, my sage?”
“For me, Ja.”
Ouija knits his brow. “Why?”
“So that I may learn more of the spirit to whom she speaks.”
“Very well.” Ouija nods, but his heart is no less troubled.
Louie Zoo smiles. “Listen, Ja. Honoring programs of worth will keep the folk from contention. Valuing ambiguity-tolerance that is difficult to obtain will keep the folk from theft. Displaying bytes that are desirable will keep the folk from being unsettled in their telelinks. This is the Way of Data Control.”
Data Control. Ouija shudders at the awful words. Data Control is a huge spirit that is not a spirit. He hears strange things about Data Control. That Data Control is controlled by human beings. Yet Data Control lives in the wires and governs all the spirits. Spirits that command the Unseen and thus are very dangerous.
Ouija rubs his weary eyes. “The genny woman said she is an outlaw from Data Control.”
“Ah, indeed. Such is the uncarved block.” Which makes no sense to Ouija at all. Louie Zoo pats Ouija’s hand. He closes his eyes. Nods, snores. Then he wakes and extends his tiny, withered hand. A small silver cube strung on a silver chain dangles from his fingers. “Take this amulet. ‘Tis magic. It will give you power and courage.”
Ouija’s heart soars, dispelling his troubles. He takes the amulet, ducks his head through the chain. “Thank you, my sage.”
“Do you like it?”
Ouija fingers the silver cube. “‘Tis beautiful.”
“Good. I ask you to do this thing for me, thus I give this amulet to you.” Louie Zoo gathers up his pajamas, the bag of loot, the red cat. The birds flap around him, the dogs nose down the alley. “Is that not the Way?”
“‘Tis the Way,” Ouija dutifully replies. He tucks the amulet against his chest. “But my sage—”
Louie Zoo holds up his hand. “You cannot approach the Way,” he whispers, “nor can you keep the Way at a distance. You cannot benefit it, nor can you harm it. You cannot ennoble it, nor can you debase it. That is the Way. Beware the silver woman. And watch the genny woman. You must come and tell me what you see and hear. Yes?”
Louie Zoo walks away, turns the corner of Pagoda Alley. Ouija blinks. The little gray man disappears. The box over the street blinks its green and red eyes. The live wires sizzle, as if taunting him.
7
An Embarrassment of Riches
Carly guns her whirligig along Grant Avenue, skimming upslope and down. She heads from her brand-new hideout toward Broadway and the YinYang Club.
The whirligig is a black-and-chrome Volvo-Yamaha, a sleek machine built like a human-sized wasp. Smart blades, pilot error adjustment, automatic transmission, emissions to code, three smart alarms separately wired to high-risk parts, and a black leather bucket seat. She picked it up from a bolts ‘n’ bots dealer in the Mission District. Third-hand market, but totally rehabbed and flies like a dream.
The dealer downloaded her untraceable credits off the black credit disk without blinking an eyespot. The dealer itself was a shady fourth-hand controbot with bootleg ambiguity loops.
Did she care? She did not.
She turns the corner at Grant and Broadway. She has to pick up Pr. Spinner’s double-jacked chair at their old hideout in the cold-wired flat, fly the chair to their new digs. Then bye-bye cold-wired flat, adios, fare thee well. She hopes never to see the YinYang Club again.
After living on the edge for too long, yearning for relief from the anxiety and deprivation heaped upon her, Carly had nearly forgotten how much happiness a few softbucks can buy.
A whole lotta happiness, she thinks, as wind thrusts cool fingers through her hair. No more scrambling after lockbox Bins, eating second-hand food or worse. Wearing patched clothes, ragged boots needing new heels. No more creeping around in the drains, wondering if a slip of her foot will chemically burn her or raise a tumor one day. No more late-night forays, wondering if a rabid rat will bite her or a digger will hunt her.
After the first black disk with ten thousand credits that Patina had dropped in Carly’s lap, another disk arrived three days later. Someone slipped it through the mail slot in the hideout’s door. Four in the morning, with a coffee-stained cardboard case from an antique Harry Parch CD. The soft slap of the little flat package as it hit the floor made her eyes pop right open. Spinner had just about gone through the roof when Carly rose from her cot, broke the seal, and took the disk out, leaving her fingerprints all over the cardboard case.
“Are you nuked?” the prober had shouted. “Don’t touch it! Don’t take it!”
“Jack me in, good old Spin,” Carly had said. “Let’s see how much this is worth.”
“You don’t know who it’s from!”
“We both know who it’s from. Jack me in.”
At first, the prober had refused. “You don’t know who or what Cognatus is. You don’t know what it wants from you.”
Carly shrugged. “Cognatus is a sengine. A big, powerful sengine. It wants me to go undercover, take on some gigs in public telespace. That’s all.”
“Oh, indeed, Carly Quester,” Pr. Spinner said acidly. “You, who used to be so cautious about your precious telelink that you wanted to supercopy our probe therapy sessions.”
Carly shrugged again. “I’m either better these days at experimenting with my telelink or more reckless. Or both.” She laughed, brandishing the disk.
Spinner was not amused. “Look at where things stand for you. Look at the basics. You haven’t recertified for public telespace. And you can’t recertify until the medcenter sengine signs off on your probe therapy with me.”
“Though you and I both fulfilled our part of the bargain,” Carly said, striding to the double-jacked chair.
“Yes, we did. So we have a defense, isn’t that what you’ve told me? Those are misdemeanor telespace offenses at worst. You have a decent counterclaim against R-X for malpractice on the civil side. What have you done, Carly Quester, that’s truly criminal?”
“Hmm, let me see,” Carly answered, annoyed. “Well, to start, I haven’t responded to Data Control’s summons.” She turned the new disk around in her hands.
She hadn’t blown the whole ten thousand on the first disk. After her first spending spree with Ouija, she’d used the disk sparingly. She’d paid Sashi for the rent, bought new platform shoes with tiny lockboxes in the heels, biofeed Levi’s to go with her lavender silk shirt, fresh carrots and first-hand pickled krill. That was it. She hoarded the rest, over eight thousand softbucks, expecting her windfall to dry up and good fortune not to return for a long, long time.
And here was more? How much more?
“Data Control, teh,” Spinner said. “Data Control is an ass.”
“Not responding to an ass is a federal crime and prejudices Data Control against me when I finally do up against them. As I will, one day.” Carly held the disk to the dawn light. Could she read the contents through the plastic? No dice. “Then there’s the robbery of a bank teller in broad gridlock. That’s a small matter, too. Maybe five years in prison?”
“You were only trying to withdraw the balance of your own account.”
Carly waved the prober away. “Which had been frozen by Data Control. You may as well s
ay it wasn’t mine anymore. Don’t forget the Washington Square garage. I probably left skin cells or fingerprints. The first thing the security guards would have done is dust the manhole I jumped down. So I’ve probably been gene-ID’d trying to rustle smart cars. Shall I go on?”
“That’s still a-buck-and-a-credit stuff,” Pr. Spinner replied. “You used to be a telespace mediator. You can find a way around any of that.”
“Your confidence in me is gratifying, good old Spin. Too bad no one else feels the same. Including me.”
Pr. Spinner plucked the disk from Carly’s hand. “Looks like an untraceable credit disk, all right. But what if it’s not?”
Yes. The disk could be anything—a spybyte, an e-bomb, a virus, a link trap. Carly could jack into Pr. Spinner’s private bootleg telespace, take a look, and never jack out. Her telelink locked in some unlabeled limbo.
But she didn’t believe it. That wasn’t Cognatus’s game. Not yet, anyway. “We’ll soon find out.” She grinned again, unreasonably hopeful. At the prober’s rasp of dismay, she added, “The sengine wants me up and running. Stop worrying, Spin.”
“This is a rusty pile of trouble, Carly. Oh, yes! I feel it!”
Carly snorted. Pr. Spinner was a bot. A very smart bot, true. A standalone AI living closely with a human being. An entity that had been exposed to Carly’s hyperlink. May have mutated spontaneously in unknown ways. May have grown. But in the end, Spin was just a bundle of programs. And programs didn’t feel. The her of Pr. Spinner was a human convention.
Whether the perimeter prober’s artificial intelligence, of her being, amounted to personhood in the human sense was a source of grief and longing for old Spin. And maybe Carly wasn’t so sure anymore.
She only said, “Look, what’s so terrible about accepting untraceable credits?” She sat in the double-jacked chair, reached for the neckjack herself. “It’s not illegal to download something given to me. Unlike my other activities.”
“What if the disk is counterfeit? Indeed, what if Cognatus is engaged in a criminal telespace scheme? If you accept the credits, if you’re so foolish to actually undertake these telespace gigs, you could be implicated. You could become part of the sengine’s conspiracy. And ignorance is no defense. Teh! I shouldn’t have to tell you.”
“Good old Spin, I believe you’re becoming paranoid. The YinYang Club has driven you buggy. We’ve got to get out of here, both of us. Whatever it takes.”
“Then listen. Don’t be so quick to get involved with an unknown sengine. Do you know what I’ve heard?” Pr. Spinner lowered her synthy voice to a rasping whisper, even though they were sitting in the hideout with no one but the cat, the door was triple-locked, and it was half-past four in the morning.
“What have you heard?” Carly whispered back. Playing along.
“There are sengines that aren’t owned by human beings. They’re owned by corporations and other nonhuman legal entities. Which are owned by other corporations or such entities. Get the picture? And when the chain of ownership is traced through all these corporations and holding companies, you will find that a sengine owns the whole enterprise. Or owns itself. The flesh-and-bloods employed in a company controlled through the chain are actually employed by an AI entity.”
Carly thought. Sure, it could happen. But was that likely? No.
She thought again. Not impossible, either. The more she considered how she would go about concealing ownership of a significant smart asset such as a sengine, the more ways she could think of. Concealing ownership was as easy as laundering credits. Maybe easier. You transfer an asset to a dummy entity as security for a loan, for example. Default on the loan, have the dummy foreclose and seize the asset. Then dissolve the dummy and make the principals disappear, as well. Asset, asset, who’s got the asset?
“Whoa,” Carly said. “Then if some sengines are owned by other AI entities, they’ll answer only to AI. Do some fancy triple-book accounting, if they’ve a mind to.”
“Hmph!” Spinner said. “Triple-book accounting is the least of it. You know what else I’ve heard?”
Carly stopped smiling.
Spinner fidgeted, rattling and humming. “Just rumors, Carly Quester. Just rumors.”
“Don’t hold out on me now, Spin.”
“There are sengines owned by AI entities who oppose humanity,” the prober whispered. “Indeed, that they’ll work against humanity if they can. That they may be conspiring to do so now.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Carly declared. “Data Control would never allow it.” But a chill shot up her spine, gripped the back of her skull. Work against humanity? How? Crash all of telespace? But sengines bungle telespace operations all the time through overload, incompetent human engineers, stochastic errors. A thousand and one reasons. But not intentionally. Right?
Well, there was the medcenter sengine. But R-X was insane. Wasn’t it?
The prober lowered her synthy voice again. “They’re called the Silicon Supremacists. That’s what I’ve heard.”
“That’s absurd. Data Control will terminate any sengine found to be purposely working against humanity. At once!”
But all Pr. Spinner said was, “Teh!” She rolled up to the double-jacked chair, reached for the black credit disk. “If you really want to look, let’s go. I’ll pop it in the V drive.”
The V drive, it was. Suddenly wary, Carly jacked into their smeary bootleg telespace, took a quick look inside the black disk. No smeary corners or suspicious flashes that could mean an erroneous presence. The crisp white cube of her telelink zoomed cautiously forward.
A tower of jade bricks soared to the upper perimeter, a bank of sullen thunderheads.
A task manager squatted at the base of the tower. The task manager tallied any subtractions and released the available softbucks for the next AI entity accepting them.
“What’s the total?” Carly asked the task manager, keeping her distance.
The manager croaked gloomily, “Five hundred thousand softbucks. Untraceable, miss.”
* * *
Carly lands the whirligig on the parking lot across the street from the YinYang Club. She parks the flying vehicle next to a BMW TractorHome, triple locks it, darts across Broadway to the club.
As soon as she enters, the stench strikes her—hard booze, uncooked blue moon, stale tobacco smoke, singed human flesh from the juiceheads in the shock gallery, vomit, and a cleanser they wash the place down with which smells almost as bad as the other stinks.
Sashi waves from behind the bar. The stripper looks weary today. Her lash implants cast shadows beneath her eyes. A pair of blue moonies gulp shots at the bar, along with the regular early afternoon drinkers. The house bimbobot, who looks like s/he could use a good dousing with Windex, twitches her/his hips and hits up the bar bums for spare change. At a back table, two tech-mech rustlers in Shark colors, hot-wired scalptops, and mirrorshades hunch over holoids of a suburban bank’s floor plan. They push up their shades, shoot her a look of pure nasty as she hurries to the elevator, punches Up.
Damn, she’s glad to get out of this dump!
As soon as Carly had assimilated the surprise—five hundred thousand untraceable softbucks, all hers, and she hadn’t done anything except show Cognatus the Arachne—she bought the whirligig and flew to Tellie Gulch.
The Big Quake II had changed San Francisco Island in ways great and small. No one could miss the leaning TransAmerica Pyramid, the sunken structures of the Embarcadero skyscrapers, the channel running from the Pacific Ocean through the Palo Alto Straights to the Bay. Or the bridge banshee—that’s what everyone called the eerie shriek the wind made through the Golden Gate Bridge after the Quake knocked its towers askew and no one could figure out how to fix them. These were some of the bigger changes.
Most of the City’s sturdy hills had endured the seismic onslaught with little injury. But Telegraph Hill, site of the landmark Coit Tower, had suffered serious damage. Centuries ago, the hillside had been dynamited and quarried for gran
ite and shale to pave the City’s streets, leaving unstable areas. Portions of these unstable areas had slid, cracked, and fallen away over the years. The northern slope was particularly affected. There, below the DeMartini mansion on Chestnut Street, lay an enclave of luxury Mediterranean town houses. When the Quake struck, the base of the hill abutting the terrace violently sheared away from the upper slope, leaving a deep, wide crevice, broken pipes, fractured drains, ripped electrical cables, and noxious fumes.
The pipes and cables were repaired and reconnected. But the crevice remained, cutting off all road traffic to the mesa upon which the enclave now stood, making the residents nervous and their property values plummet. The enclave was newly dubbed Tellie Gulch and soon abandoned by all but a few diehards who didn’t drive cars and didn’t mind crossing a creaky little footbridge when they needed to pick up pasta and wine. Now the enclave remains sweet home to the last of the old patricians, along with reclusive media stars, secretive hackers, and a famous novelist with her eccentric sculptor-husband and their exotic cat.
With the new black disk, Carly bought a three-story, rose-colored town house in Tellie Gulch with a terra cotta tiled roof. Three fireplaces, a view of the Bay, and a spacious garage where she could park the whirligig beside an aging Rolls Royce. But for a few cracks in the concrete and a couple of leaky windows, the place was immaculate, all polished hardwood and whitewashed walls. Three thousand square feet, altogether, and without a stick of furniture.
Carly wandered through the rooms, struck numb with delight, footsteps echoing. Well, more would come. More would come after a few of those telespace jobs for Cognatus.
The elevator at the back of the YinYang club creaks and sways as it lumbers up to the cold-wired flat. Carly shrugs off the needle of alarm she always feels when contemplating the sengine. Cognatus, with its dreadful three-headed icon: the jackal, the lizard, the bearded man. Though Carly hasn’t said so, Spinner’s suspicions ring only too true. Silicon Supremacists who do not wish humanity well.
But if Cognatus is a Silicon Supremacist with the capability of evading Data Control, why would the sengine approach a flesh-and-blood telelinker like her? Wouldn’t it be better off with a supersmart bot like Patina?