by Lisa Mason
* * *
“Insulted me!” Spinner sputters. “By bot, doesn’t trust perimeter probers. Teh! Indeed! The nuking sengine insulted us! After all we’ve been through!”
“Forget it, good old Spin,” Carly says, humming with joy. “I think it’s going to be all right.” She hasn’t sold out. Hasn’t betrayed humanity by working for Cognatus. She’s done the right thing, for a change. Plus she used her hyperlink in ways she never dreamed possible. It’s fantastic.
She feels a surge of loyalty toward Cognatus. She will take on another project, absolutely. She can give her full support to the sengine now. Cognatus is a major player in what is becoming a profound and terrifying schism between . . .
Humanists. Silicon Supremacists. Data Control.
Where does Data Control fit in?
Then it strikes her. “Cognatus is not especially friendly to Data Control, Spin. Am I right?”
“All we’ve been through, by bot, and worrying about Cognatus, what’s the sengine’s game, oh certainly, it makes me—” The prober’s presence in link stops rattling. “You’re right, Carly Quester. Not friendly at all.”
“Why, do you suppose?”
“Well, for one thing, Data Control is a pack of sniveling bureaucrats who have no commitment to anything except their own self-preservation. That’s for starters. Maybe Data Control doesn’t know about the Silicon Supremacists. Doesn’t know who they are.”
“Or maybe Data Control is willing to deal with the Silicon Supremacists.”
“All of the above, Carly. Remember always. Data Control is a huge bureaucracy with every corruption that goes along.”
“Yes.” Carly muses. “Ouija was told to watch me and report back to that sage of his. From everything Ouija has told me about Louie Zoo, and from all I know about Data Control’s political pitch to database the diggers, you know what I think? I think Louie Zoo is Data Control’s spy.”
“Ouija has no clue, eh?” The prober has been less than enchanted by Carly’s friendship with the digger. Carly isn’t sure how she feels about him, either.
“Not one.” A sudden urgency stings her telelink. “You’ve located Kay Carlisle?”
“Indeed I have, on a trip around the world with Saint Download. Got the address through the service contract attached to the bar code on her Presto-Panasonic prosthesis. Just as you’d surmised.”
“Mega. And?”
“And she’s squatting in a cold-wired flat in Chinatown. Down the block from our very own hideout, by bot. A dumpier dump than our place. Tragic, isn’t it?”
“Come here, Spin.” Their presences in link huddle outside the portals of the sanctum. Carly doesn’t know if that shields them from Cognatus’s audio, but she whispers anyway. “What else did you learn from the coordinate institutor?”
“Saint Download says telespace is deteriorating because of the institutor’s illegal downloading of basic coordinates. And mutating in unknown ways.”
“The appearance of archetypes in human telelink is a symptom of this deterioration? This mutation?” Carly muses.
“That’s my theory. Saint Download believes there’s too much data in too many formats going too fast to too many destinations. Like when the premillennium nets had to go from circuit switching to packet switching. Data Control can’t handle it.”
“And Kay Carlisle’s feedback hookup enables a superfast means of translating all data, programmed and erroneous. From what I’ve seen in the TeleSystems file, linkers could zoom between systems using wavelengths of light.”
“Exactly right,” Spinner hums.
“And so. The feedback hookup won’t stop this mutation of telespace. As Data Control would prefer. But I think the invention will take us onward. To whatever new version of telespace emerges.”
“An extraordinary new version, Carly Quester. With much more freedom. By bot, I think so, too!”
Carly’s telelink buzzes with excitement. “But Data Control doesn’t want any of this to happen, do they? Data Control would rather take telelinks with anomalous data like mine and force us to wipe and reprogram. Data Control would rather layer on perimeters to maintain the status quo. But for minor details like people’s civil rights and ruining people’s careers, Data Control is happy.”
“A well-paid, established bureaucracy is always happy with the status quo, Carly Quester.”
“All right. So TeleSystems had an incentive to steal Kay Carlisle’s specs. Not to exploit her invention. To suppress it. And Data Control has looked the other way. Data Control would have been pleased to see me win an adverse possession mediation against the inventor of the feedback hookup and take the invention away from her. In the meantime, Data Control is happy to allow TeleSystems to bury May’s specs in a hidden warehouse. No one is the wiser.”
“Except Kay Carlisle herself,” Spinner points out. “And you and me.”
“Yes.” Carly’s presence in link meanders back to the portals of the sanctum and hovers there, quietly stunned. “You said Chinatown? That’s where Louie Zoo lives, according to Ouija.”
“Indeed, that’s where Carlisle is hiding, too.”
“She could be in danger. Jack out of link, Spin,” Carly commands. “Find her. Bring her to our hideout. Go quickly.”
* * *
The sengine’s request for the next project is waiting when Carly’s presence in link returns to the sanctum, alone. Three windows float in telespace. Light pours from their sills, mist swirling.
In the first window stands a man, lean and edgy, with a furrowed, hawkish face. His skin slicked with cram addiction.
In the second window hovers the olive octahedron that was the man’s telelink. Edges gleaming, knife-tight.
In the third window, a news holoid unspools. On the stone flank of Teotihuacan beribboned corn dancers traipse down the stairs as a flayed corpse tumbles beneath their feet. Copbots speed around the base of the pyramid in the Mission District. The news holoid chatters about the Aztec gang. An outrage! Think of the damage these crimes will do to the tourist business! The copbots scrape up a bloody lump of flesh and bone.
Carly knows who he is. Who he was.
D. Wolfe.
Her former mentor? His advice had been worthless. Worse than worthless. Damaging. Her former lover? He was more interested in his hit of cram or shot of blue moon than in her love. Her friend? No. He’d introduced her to cram. No friend would ever do that. He had betrayed her.
Still, Carly cannot hate Wolfe now. No, the first thing she thinks of, looking at the windows which fade into the thickening mist and then wink out, was how much she had once wanted him. Respected him. Loved him.
She heads out of the sanctum, searching for thepath through which Cognatus will patch her into public telespace. Her vision blurs, and she swims through a turquoise sea bright with tropical encryption codes, subdirectories made up of scarlet tubular files, locked security devices delicately fluted around the edges and firmly shut.
She spies an irregular patch of black in the coral pink arabesques of forgotten, archived data. She swims closer. A submarine cave. Her presence in link speeds into the darkness.
And finds herself in a spare, institutional sector of telespace. A sickly sweet smell assaults her. Antiseptic and rot. She traverses a dim pathway. An occasional waste bin stands along the corridor. Nothing more. The space is preternaturally quiet.
The more she links with illicit spaces, the more easily she enters them. Well, that’s something, anyway.
Carly doesn’t like the too-silent space, the hospital smells. She turns a corner in the pathway. Sounds filter in. She hurries toward them.
The sounds grow louder. Yipping, howling, yowling, chirping, growling, clucking, moaning, screeching, trumpeting, whimpering.
Two swinging doors block the path ahead. Carly’s presence in link pushes through them. No guard tries to stop her.
The sound and the stench overwhelm her as she finds herself in a high-ceilinged room. Wire cages are stacked against ev
ery wall from the floor to the heavily layered upper perimeter. In every cage lies an abused fragment of human metaprogram.
She sees shivering dragons, weeping mermaids, serpents listlessly coiled on their own shed skins. An elephant with the torso and legs of a man. A lion head attached to the body of lizard. A stout woman with the head of a cow. A frail woman with butterfly wings. A bull’s head, a choke collar around its neck, on a little boy’s body.
And in a cage on the third row, Carly spots the wolf. A magnificent creature that has been beaten. Its gray-brown fur is flecked with blood. Its yellow eyes stare blankly, jaws dripping foam.
Carly blinks, and she sees D. Wolfe, a lean man, naked, lying crumpled on a hotel floor from too much blue moon. The shape shifts again, and she sees the olive-green octahedron that had been his presence in link, spinning. Sluicing blood.
She rushes to the cage. A simple padlock holds the wire door shut. She pulls on the padlock, which falls apart, and opens the door.
Wolfe leaps to his feet, snarling, snapping. “Who the fuck are you?” he howls, beating against the side of the cage. Carly slams the door shut, locks it. “Who are you? Who are you? Who the fuck are you?”
The other caged fragments rouse themselves. Screaming. Ranting.
The ba had been passive. Suppressed. Yes, Carly concludes, the human being from which the ba stolen was still alive.
Wolfe is dead. Murdered in the most gruesome circumstances.
Wolfe has gone insane. Most of these fragments have, too.
The bottom drops out of her presence in link. She clutches her cube, devastated.
Her time with him was over, long ago.
Now how is she going to download the coordinates of his disengaged telelink from this sector? How can she carry him back to Cognatus? He is thrashing, dangerous. Mad.
She has no intention of damaging her own telelink after all the hard work she’s done to make the hyperlink functional. That’s the way it is.
Carly sets about supercopying the coordinates of this prison for disembodied link fragments. Dead link fragments. She can take those to Cognatus for the sengine’s use. Maybe for the sengine’s advice.
She prepares to zoom out of here when the Arachne appears, dropping down from the ceiling, clinging to a silk thread. The jumping spider, this time, with stout, hairy legs. The spider finds a foothold on the side of Wolfe’s cage, enlarges itself four times.
Carly slaps the cage open. The giant spider leaps in, grappling with Wolfe’s telelink. The Arachne holds his snapping jaws at bay while it spits silk all around his flailing limbs and weaves a web.
The silk dries, hardens, forms a sturdy cocoon.
The Arachne prances away from his jaws, spits silk over his face. The spider wraps up his muzzle.
Carly’s presence in link seizes the strait-jacketed wolf, backtracks along the pathway.
Spit silk! The Arachne flings a thread down the pathway. Carly attaches her presence in link and speeds away.
Telespace flashes: black space, red space, the crowds of the Financial District, dim warehouses, a superbright medcenter sengine with ominous vivisection tools, rock ‘n’ roll clubs, shadowed alleys.
Carly zooms into the cool, marble sanctum.
The sengine’s icon appears at once when she slides through the portals, bearing her bundle. The burden of D. Wolfe’s madness is too much to bear. She uploads the data at once. Let Cognatus deal with him.
“Your credits,” Cognatus’s three voices say, and the icon lobs a black disk at her. “A hundred thousand softbucks. Good work, Quester space C. You may go. Get some rest.”
Carly catches the disk, but she pauses. “I want to see him.”
“You still don’t trust me?” the bearded man bellows. The jackal pants, the lizard watches with lidded eyes. The icon can barely contain its glee at this new find.
“As much as I trust any sengine,” she replies. “And I could ask you the same. You still don’t trust me?”
The Arachne waits by the bundle, firmly planting two legs on its catch.
“I say what you will witness and not witness,” the three voices of Cognatus shout.
“No, I’m the human being, Cognatus. If you support humanity, you’ll grant me this.” She quietly adds, “I knew him, you see.”
The bearded man nods.
The icon trots to the bundle, gingerly takes it, unwraps the spider silk. Inside crouches a wet, panting wolf cub.
At the moment of its release, the cub leaps and capers, barks and yips.
But its moment of innocent joy doesn’t last. The cub ages into a wolf, which hunkers down, its yellow-olive eyes shifting suspiciously. The wolf’s jaw drips foam. The octahedron whirls. The lean man tears at his hair and babbles.
D. Wolfe begins to howl with a weird, sobbing cry. He is dead.
14
Saints and Spinners
Wheezing and cursing, Pr. Spinner jacks out of link so fast her visuals whirl. She slaps the neckjack out. Find Kay Carlisle. She could be in danger. Spinner slams the door to the hideout, locks it, chugs down the hall.
A pack of rowdy controbots, drunk on fuel additives, stumbles past. They jostle her, leering. Tweak her shoulder ridges, shake her main housing with crude, greasy graspers.
Spinner shouts and slaps back, but the controbots are off to their next mischief. What are they doing here, anyway? Nuking YinYang Club! By bot, she’ll insist the woman take the workstation to Tellie Gulch. She cannot stand this place a minute longer. She hates slumming in the middle of the night, thank you very much.
Dawn splinters the brooding night wih wedge of sooty orange light. The fume-choked air carries cooking smells, egg breakfasts for those rising, frying protein synthies for those taking their midday break, spicy sauces and onions for those finishing their workday.
Spinner speeds west on Broadway, bound for Chinatown. The Bank of New Hong Kong fills her view, never ceasing to astonish her with its jade statuettes depicting myths so ancient no one knows what they mean anymore.
Data Control, she broods. Teh, Data Control. Every bot and linker complains about Data Control. Data Control is slow. Data Control is stupid. Data Control is inefficient, incompetent, wasteful, slothful. Intransigent. Data Control is rigid, unfair, unforgiving. Data Control pisses away everyone’s required user access fees and raises the rates twice a year. Data Control is way too expensive.
But Data Control is entrenched. And Data Control is petty. Vindictive. A spoilsport. A jury-rigger. You challenge Data Control at grave personal and professional risk. Even when you’re absolutely right.
But Data Control, a traitor?
Spinner has to pause.
Data Control selling out, with full knowledge and intent, to Artificial Intelligence entities hostile to humanity? Or Data Control—with its relentless obsession with security, safety, surveilliance of the ordinary linker, with minimizing risks—acting so carelessly? Failing to recognize the hostile intent of the Silicon Supremacists?
No, no, no. Corporate sengines may play the chain-of-ownership game, but Data Control is owned by human beings. In the end, still controlled by human beings. Yet, Spinner knows, human beings can be blind, greedy and stupid. No one knows who the big players are behind Data Control, beyond a token media figure or two. Would these hugely powerful figures hiding behind their masks of secrecy betray their own interests, their own kind?
In an earlier time, before she’d met Carly Quester, Pr. Spinner may have felt glad. And why not? That is justice, isn’t it? Those tainted with hubris will fall!
Spinner knows something evil is transpiring. Evil to her own AI sensibilities. Her logic may have been tweaked by her humiliation as an AI. She may have rebelled against the frustrating limitations of program. She may have railed against humanity and all its closely guarded privileges, oh yes.
Still.
She has sworn to her vow to humanity. Who can she and Carly Quester trust now? A sengine like Cognatus might show itself as a Humanist to Da
ta Control, but what power does Cognatus have when it steps out from behind its encryption? What intent?
Spinner turns south on Stockton Street, propelling herself through the colorful crowds of Chinatown. Rickshaws, women in conical caps, the Golden Tigers in bandoliers of bullets. And there it is, Number 17, Stark Alley. Kay Carlisle’s cold-wired hideout. The tenement squats in the shadow to the Bank of New Hong Kong Pagoda. The shack slapped together of flimsy plywood, a tiny, trash-strewn strip of concrete its front yard.
Yet the place is heavily wired. Spinner sees black boxes intercepting an array of connections to the City’s power lines. The hulk of a gray-market transformer buzzes and spits.
Spinner bang open the little gate, rolls unsteadily over bits of trash too foul for even the fourth-hand markets. At the door, she encounters a concierge in a red velvet tuxedo jacket.
“Whaddaya want here?” the concierge says, wheezing through the antique stereo speaker in the middle of its chest.
“I’m looking for this.” Spinner waves the bar code of Kay Carlisle’s robotic prosthesis at the concierge’s scanner.
“Whadda you, a repo bot?” The concierge rattles with rage. “You here to take away a poor little crippled girl’s life-sustaining hardware? Whadda you, some kind of monster?”
Spinner shakes her faceplace. Smiles as winningly as she can, given the limitations of her mouthpiece. This bot is all right. “No, indeed. I’m here to help Kay Carlisle. That’s all you need to know.”
The concierge’s single eyespot stares. The front lock clicks, and the door swings open with a long, low creak. “Three doors to your left. You better be tellin’ the truth or I’ll smash your faceplace.”
“Truth!” Spinner chirps and rolls inside.
The cold-wired flat is totally cheerless. Cold, though the day outside is warm. Dank, silent, ill-smelling. Lacking the whoops of drunken joy, vibrations from too-loud music, whiffs of herbal smoke that filter up through the floorboards to the cold-wired flat over the YinYang Club. The emptiness, the quiet are oppressive. No drunken controbots or half-mad bimbobots stagger down this hall.
For the first time—how strange!—Spinner feels a peculiar nostalgia for the YinYang Club ripple through her circuits.