Black Glass (3 page)

The spot showed the exec leaning back in an easy chair, colorful cocktail in one hand, the other hand resting lightly on the thigh of the pretty blond announcer. Wearing elegantly-draped long, filmy blue lingerie, she was now perched with an improbable buoyancy on the arm of his chair. Behind them a multiply-windowed screen showed the exec’s semblants taking digital meetings, screens cheerfully talking to other, endlessly replicating screens ...

“Take care of business ...”

“... with Slakon semblants!”
the exec chimed in, lifting his glass to the camera.

Then the final tagline from an authoritative male voice:
“They’ll believe ... you really are there!”

Small disclaimers zipped by at the bottom of the image:
Contracts closed by semblants are not legally binding unless Self-Certified.

There was another version for women execs. Grist reckoned both of them too on-the-nose vulgar for their target audience. And too retro.

Grist hit call back, using his standard business semblant, the digital face matching what he was saying. But the face Mitwell saw was composed, sober, attached to a fully dressed body. No live cam of his nudity for Mitwell. “Mitwell? I hate it! Too in-your-face, too retro. Like something from the last century ... ugh.”

“I think it was supposed to be campy that way or something.”

“We don’t do campy. Get something arty, something without all this stiff voiceover business. Get Jerome-X or somebody to do music-vid. I understand he’s finally Sold Corporate. Get on it.”

Grist clicked off line and drank some more brandy. “You wanta drink, Lisha?”

“Nah-uh.”

“You sulking?”

“Nah-uh.”

“No?” He had an impulse to please her. Strange, since he should be angry with her using lube to be able to make it with him, but he felt apologetic, in some undefined way. “Wanta take your little round ass shopping?”

“Yeah!” She suddenly sat up, all perky, playing a happy little girl, beaming.

Happy little girl; but it was almost his face, and suddenly he was reminded of himself as a little boy.

Little boy in Los Angeles. Back before they built the dike to protect L.A. from the rising seas. That far back. Visiting his dad at the Jet Propulsion Lab. The tight-assed old son of a bitch already dying of cancer, but refusing to leave his desk until they pushed him out the door. His dad blinking at him from his office chair—hunched there, feet gripping the floor as if he were physically resisting being pushed out for the next guy; an emaciated comma of a man, trying to remember why the boy was there. Not quite saying, “Why are you here?” And the boy not quite saying, “This is part of your visitation, I was supposed to see you at work.” Later at home, overhearing Mom talking on the phone to her sister about losing the child support money when Dad died. Her main concern. Money trumped death. It was a lesson.

He wanted to be alone, and just get numbdumb. He rolled over, turned up the vapors, and set the cameras on playback.

Dow Jones/Pacific Industries tickered digitally by, on the ceiling, underneath the images of himself and Lisha hard at it. His previous contract wife had been annoyed when he checked out the trading while he was banging her.

Without even looking at Lisha, he keyed in an additional ten grand for her card. Sending her shopping. Wanting her gone as quickly as possible. “There you go ...” he murmured.

Lisha kissed him on the cheek when “transfer approved” appeared on the screen and she hopped out of the bed, psyched for shopping.

It’s like guarding robots,
Pup thought.
What’s the point?

The only true robot here, though, was a single robot security guard, a vertical column on wheels with two extender arms, that rumbled slowly back and forth, scanning IDs, biometrically cross referencing faces, and otherwise having nothing to do in the long low cinderblock room. A cloudy armor-glass ceiling lit the
room with shadowless uniformity. A room of men ministering to machines; the chuffing-squeak of hard metal kissing soft metal; a faint clanking, a whirring, the occasional comment of one guard to another and a pensive absence of other human noises. The machine shaped and programmed license plates with the digital likeness of the owner imaged in, the face of the licensee shifting back and forth between face-on and profile, the LP numbers scrolling slowly by next to the face, over and over. Now and then some legislator grumped about the slower pace of plate manufacture, with human beings operating the machines—the whole thing could have been entirely automated, but the law said the men had to have some kind of physical employment. Make-work, busy work for human hands.

Those human hands were Candle’s, now, and Garcia’s, expressionlessly pushing plates under the digiprinter, taking them out, while other men sorted plates by region numbers: other UnMinded whose identities were irrelevant—living cartoons of men, like the animated bot figures in digi-games, making rote motions, without the bitching and sniping that should have made them human. And without relationships, often troublesome relationships, between prisoners. No friendships could blossom in the aridity of UnMinding—and no enmities.

It bothered Pup; he never got used to it. There was no risk here. No interpersonal “heat” of any kind, from a man utterly subordinated to a device clamped to the base of his skull.

So it was almost a relief when, once or twice a year, one of the prisoners made a mistake. Maybe the machinery stuck, or maybe the prisoner was moving slowly because of—who knows?—a virus the blood monitors had missed.

Today it was the machine: the imager needed cleaning, and a plate got stuck, halfway out, and Garcia automatically reached in and pulled and the imager came unstuck suddenly, stamping to imaging-range, a quarter-inch from the plate, and—
crunch
, the bones of Garcia’s hand were shattered.

Garcia didn’t react—and that made Pup’s gut lurch worse than the
crunch.
Feeling no pain, Garcia didn’t even pull his hand out, and the imager came down again as Pup ran over to jerk him free, a second too late—the hand was crushed out of
shape, it was bloody toothpaste coming out of a flattened glove, and Pup almost heaved.

Stremp heard the injury alarm, came rushing in—and made a snorting sound as if it were Pup’s fault. “Garcia 667329, go to the infirmary.”

Garcia walked calmly and obediently—hand dripping a trail of blood—out the door. They knew he’d go where he was sent, and of course the cameras were watching, anyway.

Stremp called to Sokio Wojakowski, the Japanese guard, or half Japanese, and told him to watch things, they were going to have to do a digifile report on the injury, even though the whole thing had already been boxed by the monitoring cam, and—Stremp glanced at his watch—it was just about time to ReMind Candle out, too.

Grist was leaning back in the perfect embrace of his desk chair, looking out the transparent office wall, watching the chopper land on the helipad just outside and thinking how much the new Casimir-force-assisted choppers looked like they were a detached part of the buildings they were landing on: smooth metal and glass curves, almost no seams, and the same colors as the building, the Slakon metallic blue and chrome with thin stripes of flat red. The chopper landing was like a limb reconnecting to a body. Which was good. Everything about the company should look like that; everything should suggest cohesion, centralized purpose. Sometimes he thought corporate authority was 90% architecture and engineering design.

Soothing thoughts helped him keep his temper. Underneath, he was seething. The risk that Candle might get out. And the accusations from Bill Hoffman. The board accusing him of hacking them—accusing him as much as it dared.

Targer was just stepping down from the chopper, trotting across to the door. Not looking at Grist as he came because he couldn’t see through the window from his side. Grist told the smart desk to open the door so Targer wouldn’t have to waste time with the security IDs.

About fifty, Target had hair the color of steel, nose like an
eagle’s beak, not a jot of wasted energy in his movements. He was British, as much as anyone was anymore; most socialized people were WorldWeb, with not a great deal of hometown culture left. Target wore his Slakon Security uniform, quietly paramilitary. Not surprised that Grist wanted to see him “PiP”,
physically in person
. This was high security stuff.

“I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop Candle’s release,” Targer said flatly, without preliminaries.

Grist leaned forward, and removed the UV goggles he’d hitched on top of his head to hold back his glossy hair. He’d just come in from the putting green on the other side of the roof.

He tossed the goggles on the desk in irritation, waving Targer to a chair. The other three walls of the room were displays, two with real-time shots of the Rockies in heavy snow, places Grist liked to ski; one of the walls showing Grist’s best moments as a golfer, playing in a loop. A perpetually sunny, successful day on the links, that wall.

“It was your job to keep him in jail, Targer. I gave you a fat bonus to keep him in jail. You’re my fucking Security. And now I don’t feel secure.” He looked away from one of his few holes-in-one, and directly at Targer, who didn’t blink. “This is pretty fucking insecure, Targer.”

“I did advise you to kill him, sir,” Targer said, with maddening calm.

Grist grunted. “Too much scrutiny on Candle.” He sighed. “... but I should have done it.”

“It wasn’t easy to get him put away. Candle was a decorated federal cop with a lot of friends. Senator Williger–”

“Senator Williger! I should have gotten rid of that asshole too!”

Targer nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Is Williger behind the quick release?”

“Maybe. Don’t think so. He’s busy with that Korean girls’ school scandal. I don’t see it being him. Someone in the privatized layer of government, I’m guessing. Someone with judicial connections. Lot of ex-cops there, maybe loyal to Candle. Or it could have been a competitor—found out about it. Wanting to do you shady.”

“Could have been—that takes in most of the Fortune 33. Hoffman, Bill Hoffman—he’s a good possibility. You sure we can’t arrange a workplace misfortune for Candle before he walks out that door?”

“Everything that happens in that jail is monitored, black boxed. We still can’t get into those boxes. It’d be hard to pull off without a lot of preparation, a lot of heavy bribery. By then he’ll be back on the streets with his full mind—and his memory.”

Grist sniffed. “Easy enough to kill him once he’s out. But if we don’t—maybe we can make lemonade, Targer. I’d like to know who’s eating my lunch on this. Someone’s engineered this release to fuck with me. They’ll contact Candle ...”

“Maybe.”

“Who’ve you got on this?”

“Halido. And I’ve got Pup Benson on the inside, but I don’t know what he can do with the cameras watching ... He’s not much use anyway.”

“All right ... Let me talk to Halido. Put him up there.” Targer tapped the desk and a ‘window’ sectioned on its display, sunken-eyed Hispanic guy in a stained baseball cap, turning to look at the floating video-eye, backpedaling. The camera moved in on him: there was a star made of diamonds in one of Halido’s incisors. “Jesus, Targer, you got a remote bird following me?”

“Shut up. Mr. Grist wants to talk to you.”

“I don’t see him.”

“And you won’t, either. Shut up and listen.”

Grist knew it irritated Targer to step down the chain of command this way, but there was a nasty variable out there. Candle. A human X-factor. It made Grist feel good to deal with it hands-on.

“Halido,” Grist said, “if Candle gets out, don’t kill him until I tell you. Stay with him. Report every time he contacts anybody or anybody contacts him.”

“You got it, sir.”

Grist waved at Targer, and Halido blinked out, replaced with a view down the fairway.

The screen said, “Legal calling, Mr. Grist.”

Grist shook his head. “Have my semblant talk to them.”

“Yes sir ...”

“Targer?” Grist said, in that way he had.