Black Glass (14 page)

“I’m sure your staff here does a great job,” Candle said, “but I’m surprised you don’t use expert systems for most of it, maybe some underground cloud computing ... I mean—once you’ve bought them you don’t have to pay them and they’re likely to be fast—and they’re not going to give state’s evidence to get less time–”

Nodder flicked his hand dismissively. “They exaggerate how flexible and intelligent those systems are. We do use some adjunct expert programs. But they’ve got short horizons. Anyway, people who’ve dodged the law, they have ... almost a sixth sense, an intuitive
ability ... they know
when
to dodge the law. And there’s another thing—really it’s the main thing—most of the existing programs and robots have software hidden in them to report back to the feds if they’re used for something illegal. These ladies are not burdened that way.”

“And it’s only illegal,” Shortstack said, “because Congress is owned by the 33 and the 33 calls it ‘unregulated’. But we
do
regulate it—we stay fair. We got to, or people will come after us. And anyway we make more money being fair to people. They come back because we pay off.”

“But the 33—they’re dogging you?” Candle asked.

“Yeah. Starting to get close. Oh, we got the best encryption, we got a lot of noise-floggers to create cover. Only now—shitter-shatter, boy, we had some
close
calls. We’re looking to you to come in, provide expert protection. You the Man, you know law enforcement. You worked computer crime for awhile ...”

Candle shook his head, dubious. “I don’t know—that stuff updates, like. every few months. I’m way behind by now.”

“You got a feel for it though,” Shortstack insisted. “You can get caught up. Anyway we think Slakon is particularly interested in us. They don’t know who we are or where we are but they know
that
we are. And we represent a ... a ...” He looked at Nodder for the right words.

“A dangerous phenomenon that threatens their control,” Nodder said.

“Yeah! And we figure you’re motivated to run interference, Rick. You know Slakon, you had your run-ins ... Takes a cop to fool the cops ... Anyway, hode, what else you got going on? And this’ll give you a chance to get some of your own back, a little taste of revenge against those Slakon fucks. You know there was no real reason for them to go after Danny the way they did—that was so small time. Such a small amount of rake-off. It was “make an example’. And it turned out
you
had to be the example. So what you say?”

It occurred to Candle that since he was being targeted by Slakon, it wasn’t that smart of Shortstack and Nodder to bring him in—he would bring even more heat on them. He figured that was Rina again. She was mad at him. But she wanted him
around. “Rina put you up to this?”

Shortstack looked carefully blank. “She’s a major investor. She’s part of all our decisions.”

“I see.”
Anyway, hode, what else you got going on?
“Tell you what ...” He looked at the seething tables, charts, data piling up on the Black Stock Market screens. It was like the movement of a seismograph of true laissez-faire commerce; it was an electroencephalograph of the real market place. It was the dance of individuals struggling to survive, signifying, in the small market squares of the world. There was something romantic about it that drew him. “This is the kind of illegal that ... should be legal. This is ... this is something I don’t feel like I can say no to. If it pays reasonably well. I just hope I’m not bad luck for you.”

“Yeah,” Brinny muttered. “I fucking hope so too.”

F
ive holographic faces appeared on the Multisemblant array, set about a circle, looking outward, away from one another.

“I hope y’all know what you’re doing,” the Bulwer semblant said.

“This will give us an edge over the rest of the Fortune 33,” the Grist semblant said. “Oh he knows what he’s doing.”

The Claire PointOne semblant frowned. “The prospect is repellent. It’s, like, a violation of my inner being.”

“Semblants,” Grist said, “shut up. I’m thinking.” He and Sykes were standing under the bluewhite buzzing lights, gazing at the array. Grist was feeling like he was on the verge of changing the world, in some way. And he was almost convinced it was a change that the world needed. It was, anyway, one that Grist needed. That had always been good enough before—so why was he hesitating now?

“... So you see,” Sykes was saying, unwrapping a marijuana-tinged Yum Wad and cramming it into his mouth, “I had to separate the merged ones—to re-establish full coalescence of all five, we had to start from scratch—and once we’ve got merge this may offer a more unified model ...” He chewed vigorously, mouth open, eyes glazing, as he appraised the five restless holographic heads. Yatsumi, Grist, Bulwer, Alvarez, Claire PointOne.

“What about Hoffman?” Grist asked.

“Still too much distortive resistance. But I thought five’d come out coherently. Only, I have to form it around a primary personality mode—it needs a unifying personality principle or
it’s just a confused psychotic mish-mash, like last time.”

“What principle?” Grist asked.

“Ah well—it depends on how you’d define it. Some call it ‘acquisitive egoism’.”

Grist shrugged. “What the hell does that mean?”

Sykes tossed the wrapping paper on the floor, where it joined a dozen others. A plasticine snowfall. “Oh well—another way of describing it is ... megalomania.”

Grist shifted his weight to his other foot, feeling a vague discomfort. Suddenly, for no reason, his joints ached. He might need to have them rebuilt. “Megalomania? I’ve been accused of that often enough. What successful businessman in this century hasn’t? It’s all smokescreen, that talk of ‘megalomania’—it’s disingenuous flummery, designed to hide sheer envy. We want the multi-semblant to be
driven!
Motivated! Yes—grasping!
Carpe Diem!
The day must be seized! And to seize you must grasp!”

“So that works for you?” Sykes nodded, sniffing. Chewing. “I mean—as a mind cohesion strategy?” He dug in an ear absentmindedly with an index finger. “Okay. Okay then.”

“Why are you waiting? Go for it.”

“Um—not sure what the results will be, short term or long term. Don’t want to make you mad. You do have a way of threatening me with some nightmarish fate or other when you’re mad. Glue my rectum shut, wedge my mouth open or something. If it doesn’t come out right—you’ll blame me. I’d be crazy not to hesitate.”

“Yes yes, I’ll take that into account. When we’ve merged this thing, we’ll observe it for a time—then we’ll add more. And in the end we’ll have the most powerful business mind on the planet. A mind who’ll anticipate what all the others are thinking and doing—it’ll be one step ahead of all of them at once. And then ...”

He broke off. He didn’t want Sykes, or anyone, to know about the ‘and then’.

“Oh yes,” the Grist semblant said, chuckling. “And then!”

“Just can it, semblant,” Grist said.

“Shall I go ahead and do the merge, Mr. Grist?” Sykes asked. “I mean—shall I do it right now?” His hand hovered over the controls.

Grist, standing beside him, gazing raptly at the array ... and hesitated, himself. He licked his lips. Then he nodded. “Do it.”

Sykes caressed the spherical input he preferred to a standard keyboard ... and the semblants shimmered. Claire PointOne’s image seemed to gasp and wail ...

“It’s a violation, an intrusion, a rape!” her semblant yowled.

And then the five images merged into one. The Picasso effect was there for a moment; then it seemed to shake itself into a more coherent face. It was still a bit like a person whose face had been reconstructed after an accident, but not without a pleasing esthetic. The multisemblant had Claire’s nose and mouth, and they didn’t quite seem to go with the male eyes from Grist and Alvarez and the cheekbones from Yatsumi, but ... Grist found the facial agglomeration rather attractive, in a way.

Might be interesting to get Lisha’s face made that way for awhile.

The merged semblant looked around. “Who?” It blinked and shuddered. “Am?” It squinted at Grist. “... I?”

“You are the beginning of the Multisemblant,” Sykes said. “Mr. Grist’s—special consultant, I guess. And you are my invention. Which reminds me, Mr Grist, about that patent we talked about. I haven’t got the forms yet ...”

“Yes, later,” Grist said. He had no intention of sharing a patent. He didn’t want anyone else to have the semblant combining capacity, ever, if he could help it. “Is it in some kind of infantile state now? I mean, asking ‘who am I ?’–”

“Just a moment of thinking, cogitating, aloud,” the Multisemblant said, briskly. Its voice phasing in and out of sharp definition, but intelligible. “I am not an infant. I am a completed being. I am five semblants fused into one.” It’s voice became slightly more like Grist, as it said: “I am something wonderful: the greatest business mind on the planet.”

“Very good,” Grist said, pleased.

“Nevertheless,” Sykes said, chewing noisily, “its personality isn’t really unified. It’s not just a merging of five semblants—it has to be
a whole new one
, which has access to the databases that constitute those five. But it needs to be a ‘whole that’s more than the sum of the parts’ or all you’ll get is dissonance. Like light,
before it’s oscillated into a laser, it’s got no special direction. So we’re making the ‘ruby’, so to speak, now, and it’ll take some time. It’s still working on it. It will be your ultimate consultant soon, though ... Ah—you see the dissonance spiking there? Remember the new AI has an I-core that either supports emotion or something so close to emotion you can’t tell the difference. That has to be hierachized—otherwise you’ll have it giving way to every furious impulse. If you push for too much too soon it’ll react in anger and tend to form its new personality around anger-based complexes the way traumatized people do.”

“I am never
too much
,” the Multisemblant snarled angrily, right on cue. “I am exactly what I should be—always!”

Sykes gave Grist a “See what I mean?” look.

“Get its emotions under control, then, Sykes,” Grist said. “I want access soon. They’ll have to be ...” He broke off. It really was best Sykes didn’t know. The tubby onanist might try to go to the 33. He wondered if he needed more direct surveillance on Sykes.

“Too much too soon,” Sykes repeated, shaking his head. “It’ll grasp the worst parts of you—and the others—to use as the basis of its personality. That’s according to the best psyche models we have. It’ll form itself out of the fearful parts of you, the cynical parts, the compulsive parts–”

Grist turned Sykes a sharp look. “Those are
bad
things? Those are the tools of success! But the way you’re putting it is a little derogatory—a little
personal
.”

Sykes took the Yum Wad from his mouth, tossed it at a waste basket—which moved closer to neatly catch it. “Waste basket ignores the wrappers, only goes for the heavy stuff. Cheap fucking thing. Oh, you think I’m being too personal, with the Multisemblant’s cynicism, that stuff? Sorry, boss, but I have to be realistic about what I’m working with.”

“Just get it functioning. Whatever it takes. Go ahead an use the unifying element you were talking about—Call it megalomania if you want.” He smiled. “I call it real self-determination. It always worked for me.”

Sykes chewed his lip, then he made a little shrugging tilt of his head, and his fingers flicked over the controls.

The Multisemblant cried out in multifarious anguish.

Then it babbled, for a full minute, in a mix of English, Japanese, Spanish ...

Grist glanced at his watch.

“English only, imperative one!” Sykes commanded. “Prioritize as per final indice referent! Now!”

The faces merged a little more. Now it looked even less jumbled. Not a pleasant face—more the face of the descendent that would come about if Yatsumi, Claire, Alvarez, Grist and Bulwer had somehow interbred. Mostly a male face.

“Multisemblant?” Sykes prompted. “Do you have a sense of who you are now?”

Its voice was a little surer too, when it spoke. Close to Grist’s voice but with a faint Texas accent. “Yes, oh hell yes,” said the Multisemblant.
“I am the beginning. And boys, I am the motherfucking end.”

Grist stared. “Sykes–”

A soft chime in the bone under his right ear. A gentle computer voice in his head spoke.
“Targer calling.”
Grist waved Sykes away and walked off, toward the door. “Yes, what is it?”

“Targer here,” came the voice in his ear, though the computer had already announced him. “Halido’s decoy worked.”

“You sent in one of the old ones, the birdseyes?” Grist asked, going through the door into the corridor.

A beige security-guard robot trundled down the hall, rolling by him; its upper half of sculpted hard plastic, shaped like the stylized head and torso of a man, its lower half a truncated stainless steel cone with wheels and telescoping personnel-restraint extenders; as the robot rolled by, it turned its eyeless face toward him, invisibly scanning Grist’s eyes and the ID clip on his lapel to see that he was authorized. It recognized him, and murmured something soothing and respectful.

“We did just that,” Targer was saying. “A woman there—ah, we’ve identified her as an ex-whorehouse madame, a Rina Qu Lam—she got Halido’s attention and when he turned the birdseye toward her she netted it with her blouse and stepped on it.”

Grist chuckled. “A woman of experience. And while they were focused on that ...?”

“Right. The dragonfly went in. Our smallest model. Followed them to their Black Stock Market—just three people and some hardware in the building next door. The ’fly’s on the ceiling, watching them, listening, right now. A nice clear transmission.”

“And they haven’t made the dragonfly yet?”

“No. No it’s really pretty small—almost like a house fly. And it can recharge from moisture, you know. It takes moisture on any wall, and the electrical charge that accumulates–”