Better Angels (35 page)

“Isn’t it all alien technology?” Jiro said with a weak smile as he stared at his hand. “What makes you think DNA isn’t some kind of ancient nanotech? No human being invented the biotechnology of the body, but we all grow accustomed to using it. People were using their bodies long before they developed cell theory. For most of human history, the body has been a black box. Still is a black box for most of us, most of the time.”

Seiji shook his head.

“Nonsense!” he said. “How can it be alien when you were born into it?”

“Maybe we were all ‘born’ from that,” Jiro said, pointing at the denizens of the screen.

“All you’ve found is some new species of bacteria or something,” Seiji said. “And why would your nanomachines be on an ‘angel’ shoulder blade, anyway?”

“It’s the default condition, like I said. When that creature, whatever it was, died and was preserved in La Brea, those mechbugs that were part of it reverted. Default is dormancy, dormancy is default.”

For all the heat or light Jiro and Seiji might have generated in discussing them, the things themselves—from the base of an angel’s wings, if that was their point of origin—kept toiling ceaselessly away, quite oblivious to their definition and category.

* * * * * * *

Peculiar Weather

My justice has ground slowly, Mike Dalke thought, but it will grind exceedingly fine.

On the flight east to Retcorp and Lambeg’s headquarters in Cincinnati, he had traveled as confidential cargo aboard a CMD corporate jet. It had been an uneventful trip, so uneventful that—in his livesuit cocoon, inside the sensory deprivation tank in which he was being shipped—he had fallen into a deep sleep.

Waking up when the jet touched down in Northern Kentucky, he pondered the idea that, once, people only flew during their dreams; now they dreamed during their flights. As he was unloaded from the plane and put aboard a big truck trailer, he mused that people probably flew in their dreamlives long before they ever dreamed of flying in real life.

Making dreams real. That was what technology had always been about, as far as Mike could tell. Technology was going to make his own dream of justice a reality, sooner than his unknowing enemies might suspect.

Retcorp and Lambeg ensconced him in the deep sub-basement of their “Twin Towers Complex B” office buildings. Physically he was located at the bottom of their corporate edifices, but informationally he had access to and managed all R & L’s corporate data, to the very highest levels.

His existence here was all a grand, multi-leveled, multi-layered shell game. At the most superficial level, he was here as a “marketing research experiment in sensory deprivation and virtual interaction”. At a deeper stratum, he was a data-minder, his presence a corporate response to some of the consciousness-like quirks the big AIs and the Net itself had developed, particularly since the Infosphere Crash some years back. At a still deeper stratum, his presence was a hedge against another infosphere crash of whatever sort—through wetware memory linked by CMD tech to free-standing ParaLogics LogiBoxes. Surely it was just a coincidence that both Crystal Memory Dynamics and ParaLogics were companies with which Retcorp & Lambeg also happened to have strong interlocks at the directorate level.

At the deepest stratum, however, despite all the slavish burdens put upon him, he was free in ways his “employers” could never know. The bioinfomatics and biomedical computing graduate students—his high-turnover “keepers” in this electronic zoo, who monitored his bodily functions and tried to make sense of what he was doing in the infosphere—they didn’t have a clue.

The keepers had no idea of the ways in which he had mapped imagery and words and ideas from everywhere in the infosphere onto his own personal memories, his own life and thoughts. What could they know of what it felt like to leave the flesh largely behind and take on a “body electric,” in ways Whitman could never have imagined that term? Mike’s fingertips reached into deep space. His feet went to the Earth’s core. His heart and viscera were all humanity had ever known and recorded in every language, code, and symbol system. His sky of mind was all they ever hoped to achieve.

Did he miss human interaction? Why should he? He could have had personal dialog with his keepers, but he had come to realize that human biological and social life were mainly just false conversations, whether as words between individuals, or genes between generations. Art and culture were just falser imitations of those already flawed conversations.

He could know all of humanity’s electronically-mediated interactions, if he chose. He might choose to comment on them too, someday, in his own way. For now, however, Mike preferred to communicate with the Culture in its Deep Background. His netizens. His minions. His horde. He commanded, they obeyed. That was communication enough.

Every computer system in the infosphere was transparent to his “gaze.” Through what his minions discovered, Mike found that he had access not only to deep space but also to thick time. Among the records connected with his own lifetime, Mike had found the computer-stored confidential case files of David R. Morica, M. Div, D. Psych, Lt. Colonel USAF, Chaplain, Whiteman AFB, USAF, Missouri, USA—the man who had tried and failed to cure Mike’s father of his key phobia:

“Subject Carter Dalke, rank of Major, is married (wife Miriam) and the father of two young sons (Michael and Raymond). Subject demonstrates a recently manifested dire fear of keys. This extreme claviphobia seems to be part of a constellation of issues surrounding an identity crisis connected to his imminent loss of career and status as a Missile Flight Officer. The claviphobia seems obscurely linked to the fact that, as a member of Missile Flight F, the Subject—a very religious man—has been one of those who have ‘held the keys to kingdom come,’ as he has put it.”

Yes, Mike thought as he reviewed the file. His silo-sitting father had been very much a “God and Country” man. The latter had failed him almost as thoroughly as this headshrinker’s outdated psychobabbling—

“Subject is still unfazed by the operational use of his missile key. Every time turning a mundane key doesn’t result in catastrophe, however, instead of weakening the Subject’s associations of key and catastrophe as it normally should, the feared result’s failure to actually occur paradoxically amplifies and reinforces the fear response itself, making the Subject believe that the feared result is now all the more likely to occur. The more the expected fatal event has failed to occur in the past, the Subject believes, the more likely it is to occur in the future.

“The result is the Subject’s recurring visions of houses, cars, and entire cities bursting into flame whenever he turns a key in a locked door or automobile ignition....”

Mike recalled the strange coincidence that the assailants who bashed in his head with shotgun butts had appeared at exactly the moment he unlocked his driveway gate—almost as if that action had called them into being. No, that was ridiculous. Mike had never had dreams of pain and fire associated with keys. That was his father’s affliction, the one that followed him even when he mustered out, to retire on government tranquilizers and government rehabilitation, on a government-loan farm in Wyoming, until corrupt bankers and county bureaucrats took that away too.

“...how the Subject’s ultraparadoxical abreaction phase functions. Unpredictably and paradoxically, the extinction of a specific response has become intimately linked to a generalization and amplification of another response, one incorporating several of the same key elements.”

Perhaps Mike’s memory of his father’s experience had soured him on any possible help CMD’s Doctor Marin might have given him. When Mike read her files on him now, he saw that she had kept a sort of covert watch on his behavior. The depth of her files could not have resulted from his single visit to her. Yet, for all the files’ unexpected detail, Mike still doubted he had missed much by not continuing down that particular “therapeutic” avenue with Marin.

“We should have expected this sort of ‘dream’ reaction,” Doctor Marin noted in her confidential files. “Michael Dalke suffered head trauma severe enough to, in some sense, destroy his former self. He had no time to mourn the loss of that self, to begin on the grieving process for it, before Dr. Schwarzbrucke offered him a new self with new powers. Almost from the moment the installment surgery was finished, he has spent most of his waking hours manipulating distant machines. Little wonder Dalke has dreamed up a compensation fantasy about a world of artificial minds living inside machines, seducing him into their world.”

Dreamed it up? They would soon see how real that dream was—Dr. Schwarzbrucke especially.

“...underwater is clearly some sort of descent into himself,” Marin’s notes continued, “into his unconscious. The mandala-city is a vision of the self as a unified whole. In that city are the many inhabitants, the sources of Michael Dalke’s voices, the siren singers seducing his unified self into dispersing, to flowing into and becoming just another one of the many voices. The Self, to remain unified, must keep those siren-singing psychoid processes organized within itself, under its control.

“In Michael Dalke’s case, their splitting alternately into angels of aid and demons of disintegration is part of the classic psychomachia encountered in the formation and development of the overall Self. Dalke’s trauma, the lack of an adequate timeframe for his grieving process, the crystal memory installation, the hasty formation of his new machine-interactive role—these all understandably loosened his control over those autonomous psychoid processes that live in each of us.

“I advised Michael to tighten his control, to side with the angels and the aid they offered—and against the disintegration the demons posed. I advised him to make use of that aid. To get a grip on his own reins and put those aspects of his personality to work for him, pulling together as a team under his command. If he does do so, the situation will settle down fairly quickly and his dreams of the ‘machine elves’, as he referred to them, will cease.”

Ha! So much for Marin’s predictive abilities, Mike thought. The “dreams” had not ceased at all, though he had made great use of the elfish netizens’ aid. At first he was surprised at how readily he was able to use them, but when he thought about it he realized that people had been treating their computers as desktop or palmtop oracles for years: Got a question? Ask the net. Mike had just carried that tendency to its logical extreme

From out of their Deep Background, the netizens of the Culture had—as he had commanded them—put together for him the masses of evidence solidly linking the Mongrel Clones to police corruption in southern Oregon and northern California. With the netizens’ help Mike had gathered all the supporting documentation he needed: bank transaction records, telephone records, newspaper reports, internal memos from organizations ranging from local police and sheriff’s offices to the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement and the federal DEA. Only having such information at hand had enabled him to create the narrative outlining the Blue Badge Conspiracy.

Now, the netizens’ work would enable him to send all that information first to the appropriate authorities and then to the media—in order to initiate the investigation, to get the wheels of justice grinding more quickly.

Send it, he commanded his agents in the infosphere. And it was sent.

In the media over the next several days Mike watched happily as, with a little help from his netizen friends, he managed to give those old purblind doomsters, Chance and Justice, a set of loaded dice, with which they promptly began rolling sevens and elevens.

“Yesterday,” said the FBI director at his NetSpan news conference, “the FBI, DEA, DOJ, California DOJ and BNE, major Oregon and California news outlets, and national wire services all received, from an anonymous tipster a carefully indexed and cross-referenced seven hundred page document. The tipster document details a pattern of kickbacks, payoffs, and long-standing illegal association and cooperation between law enforcement in southern Oregon and the Mongrel Clones Motorcycle Club, now revealed to be the West Coast’s largest producers and purveyors of the Schedule Three Controlled Substance known as Blue Spike. We are happy to have the opportunity to bring swiftly to an end this criminal partnership which grew and festered under the CSA regime.”

Mike almost laughed at that. The collaboration between the Mongrel Clones and corrupt law enforcers had a history that long predated the CSA regime—and many of the same people castigating the CSA now had served in government during its reign. What the hell, though? Go ahead and make political hay out of it. Why should he care—so long as it was his will they were ultimately working?

Watching the news reports, Mike took a personal pleasure in seeing spike labs being broken up. He was especially pleased at seeing a particular sheriff’s deputy being marched away in handcuffs by agents of the FBI’s government corruption unit.

“The document that came streaming out of faxes and spamming across net sites two days ago,” said a NewsNet talking head, “includes a thorough narrative and extensive supporting materials. Together these outline the history, nature, and extent of police corruption brought about by the Mongrel Clones’ suborning of local law enforcement in Oregon.”

Vengeance is mine, saith the Horde, Mike thought, scanning report after report on the Blue Badge arrests.

“Though the machineries of criminal prosecution may at times seem large and slow,” said a prosecuting attorney from Klamath Falls, speaking on one of the many All Crime—All the Time channels, “this bolt of paper and electronic text has jumpstarted us to immediate action. Justice demands that we see this matter through to a decisive conclusion, and we will.”

On every channel and newsite and holovision net he searched, the story was the same:

“In exchange for considerable bribes,” said a reporter for the Modus Operandi crime show, “local police officials established a tradition going all the way back to the production of methamphetamine in the eighties and nineties. So long as the Clones marketed their wares only over the border in California, police and sheriff’s departments in rural southern Oregon looked the other way or even provided cover for Clone criminal activity. As a result, the Mongrel Clones eventually coordinated a growing empire of clandestine deepwoods drug labs which, until recently, specialized primarily in that most prized of the new-generation designer drugs, Blue Spike.”