Hardwired (18 page)

The house is a hymn to the interface, a geometric singularity composed of crystal and expensive off-planet alloy, suggesting the linkage of the human mind with digital reality. Jagged antennas seek the sky, transparent plastic tubes, part of some heating/cooling system, writhe over the house in a complex arterial pattern, carrying brightly colored liquids of exotic properties; streams of fluid insulated by bubbles, that suggest electrons speeding through their matrix. The walkway leading to the house is paved with millimeter-thin slices of meteorite protected by hard, transparent gas-planet plastic, the shining veins of nickel and magnesium bright against the shadowy; unoxidized iron, spotted with flecks of chromium and silicon. Other meteorites stand frozen in glass on alloy pillars in the forecourt. The door is inset, more polished alloy. It opens, like the other, without sound.

“Looks like an illustration from
Cyborg Life
,” Sarah mutters. The dark laser-cut stone of the walls merges with bright alloy beams like the wood and plaster of a half-timbered house. Liquid-crystal art re-forms itself continually on the walls. Cowboy recognizes one of the patterns as a giant-sized schematic of one of his motor-reflex chips.

“Leave your guns in the foyer, please. I won’t touch them.” Inside the house, the voice has a smoother quality.

Sarah has insisted on carrying the Heckler & Koch in her ruck, and with a grudging smile she puts the ruck on a table. Cowboy puts his belly gun next to it. They step into the next room. Soft gelatine-filled furniture glows Cherenkov blue from internal light sources. Aquariums filled with genetically altered fish emit the same cold spidery light as a computer display. Randomly generated tones sound in pointillist pattern from concealed speakers. Reno enters the room from an alloy-rimmed door.

“Hi, Cowboy. It’s been a while.”

“Hi, Reno.” Cowboy looks at his surroundings in a studied way. “You seem to be doing well for yourself,” he says.

Five years ago Reno’s delta had sucked a missile into its port engine over Indiana and then buried itself in some dark West Virginia hollow, sending a potential 200-million-dollar profit in pharmaceuticals skyward in a clean blue alcohol blaze. It was one of the last big delta runs and a turning point in the shift toward the use of panzers. Reno had got out of the plane before it screwed itself into Cheat Mountain, but he’d burned himself badly trying to horse the delta over the tree-crowned ridges to the landing field in Maryland, and his parachute hadn’t developed properly. Parts of him had been scraped off the trees with a shovel. In Cowboy’s world Reno’s bad luck was still talked about with respect.

Cowboy had visited him in the hospital a few times, and talked by phone once or twice a year since. Reno’s body had been put back together, Cowboy had been told, but there had been too much brain damage for it to work right; and that ruled out running the mail.

The rebuild job looks good. Arms and legs in fine working order. The blue eyes match. He looks fit in flannel pants and a Hawaiian shirt. Reno’s face is young except for the fine networking of lines around the eyes, and his teeth gleam white and even in the twilit room. The dark sockets in his head are covered by shoulder-length brown hair.

“I keep up with my portfolio,” he says. There is a strange vacancy behind his eyes.

“Reno, this is Sarah. Sarah, Reno.” They nod at each other while Cowboy puts down his box of hearts. Cowboy reaches out to shake Reno’s hand.

And it feels wrong. A little too warm, perhaps, a little too...dry. Even the best of palms are just the least bit moist. Cowboy looks down at the arm with his infrared eyes and sees that the heat distribution is uniform, which is not the case with any arm Cowboy has ever seen.

“A prosthesis,” says Reno, seeing Cowboy’s expression. “This and the two legs and other bits here and there.”

“But you could have got real legs,” says Cowboy.

Reno taps his skull. “I
got
real legs, but there was too much brain damage. My motor coordination was shot to hell, and my sense of touch was pretty much gone–– I’d lost too much skin, too many neurons. But Modernbody was looking for someone to test their latest prostheses. ” He shrugs. Cowboy gets an odd feeling from the gesture, as if the shrug weren’t real but rehearsed. Maybe Reno’s given this explanation a few too many times.

“The arm and legs are hardwired in. There’s a liquid-crystal computer replacing a damaged part of the brain. The feedback isn’t very good on my sense of touch, but then it wasn’t any good after the crash anyway. It’s all experimental stuff, very advanced. Light alloy, lighter than bone and muscle. I’m a lot more mobile than I used to be. And if they go into production, the experimental prostheses will be cheaper than cloning new legs and regrafting. ”

“I didn’t know,” Cowboy says.

“Modernbody pays me a nice pension,” Reno says. “It bought this house. All it costs me is a checkup every couple months, sometimes a rewiring with an improvement. And my new parts will last longer than the originals.”

The coming thing, Cowboy thinks. Live forever in a bodily incarnation of the eye-face, not limited to the speed of artificially enhanced neurotransmitters but approaching the speed of light, extending the limits of the interface, the universe. Brain contained in a perfect liquid-crystal analog. Nerves like the strings of a steel guitar. Heart a spinning turbopump. The Steel Cowboy, his body a screaming monochrome flicker, dispensing justice and righting wrongs.
Who was that masked AI? Dunno, pardner, but he left this silver casting of a crystal circuit.

To Cowboy, it sounds pretty good. If they can lick that feedback problem.

Reno looks at him with his old-young eyes. Eyes that were a lot younger until that port engine spewed its molten remains into the thin air of Indiana and the horizon began to do flip-flops.

“So,” Reno says. “You people get caught in a crossfire?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

The eyes narrow. “From what I hear the crossfire extends all the way to California.”

“I’ll worry about that when I get West. After that, if you have any Tempel Pharmaceuticals stock in your portfolio, I’d sell.”

Reno frowns into one of his crystal pieces of art. “Sit down,” he says, “and tell me about it.”

They sit next to each other on a pair of armchairs while Cowboy gives a brief recapitulation of what he knows. Sarah assumes a half-lotus on a glowing nuclear blue couch, not offering comment. Staying unobtrusive, as bodyguards should.

Reno rubs his chin. “So what do you need? Transportation west? A place to hide?”

Again Cowboy has a strange feeling. As if Reno is somehow cruising on automatic pilot. That, for all his apparent helpfulness, it’s all reflex, that he’s not really interested.

“We want to sell something.” Cowboy reaches for his box of computer matrices and tears open the cover. Reno leans forward and peers into the container.

“We want to move a thousand of these,” Cowboy says. “All perfect, all Orbital quality, made for Yoyodyne by their Olivetti subsidiary. OCM Twenty-two Eighty-ones, to be precise.” There are matrices times fifteen K in the panzer, but he doesn’t want to take more of the Hetman’s property than necessary. He hasn’t forgotten whom Sarah is really working for.

“Heart crystals,” Reno murmurs. He makes a breathy sound with his lips. “So this is what that battle was over.”

Cowboy feels he has succeeded in attracting Reno’s attention.

They make the world go around, so central that the nickname “heart” isn’t out of place, for if the hearts stopped, the body would die. Computer cores made of liquid-crystal that can re-form itself in any configuration, creating the ultimate efficiency for any particular piece of cybernetic business that needs doing, shifting from storage of data to moving it to analyzing it and then altering to a form most efficient for acting on the analysis. Hearts that can make minds, from little bits of brightness in Cowboy’s skull that let him move his panzer, to larger models that create working analogs of the human brain, the vast artificial intelligences that keep things moving smoothly for the Orbitals and the governments of the planet.

All in miniature potential, here in the cardboard box.

“Forty hearts per box,” Cowboy says. “The other boxes are in a safe place. You get thirty percent for being our thirdman. ”

Reflected crystals gleam like rubies in Reno’s eyes. “Let me check the market,” he says.

He touches two places on the midnight-black table in front of him and a comp board glows in the interior, projecting its colors onto Reno’s face. From underneath he slides a black box wired to the comp in the table and a box of crystal memories. He slips a memory cube into the trapdoor of the box, then unspools a stud from the box and puts it into his temple. He presses some of the keys on the deck face and leans back in his chair.

The fish tanks bubble in the far-off humming distance. Reno’s expression softens, then hardens again. He is flying the face for a long time. Then his eyes flick to Cowboy, and his eyes show surprise.

“Tempel stock has gone up twelve points since noon.” Reno’s voice is dreamy, reluctant to unfuse with the interface. “They’re moving against Korolev, a major takeover attempt. Korolev’s vulnerable right now–– they’ve made a lot of bad moves.” Cowboy sees Sarah’s startled expression from the corner of his eye and knows she understands more of this than she’s been letting on, and that he’ll have some questions for her later. But Reno’s voice drones on from his chair.

“Tempel is strong in pharmaceuticals and mining, but their aerospace division is weak. Acquisition of Korolev would strengthen them. The market seems to be saying Tempel will win, but my guess is that it won’t be a sure thing. Korolev has a lot of resources to call on...and they’re so secretive there are bound to be some things Tempel doesn’t know about.”

Cowboy pictures the two Orbital giants grappled in their electronic conflict, using the paper value of the shares as leverage against each other, feeding on data more precious than gold, artificial intelligences and corporate minds scheming to manipulate the streams of numbers. Buying stock and futures through third parties they hoped no one knew they controlled. Both sides had resources that were almost unlimited, and victory would go to the most subtle, the one who manipulated the other through the most blinds, who had a better comprehension of the other’s weaknesses. Reno seems to fade away, his mind moving back into the interface, sucking data through the filter of the memory box. Cowboy sneaks a look at Sarah and sees her, like Reno, turning inward, absorbed for a moment in her own inner landscape. Assembling a picture more complete than Cowboy’s. He wishes she’d give him some of what she knows.

Reno unfaces. The glowing colors in the deep ebony table fade. He puts his crystal memory back in its file and takes a breath. “The borders are fading,” he says. The voice is still dreamy, his eyes trancelike, staring a thousand yards into some internal landscape. “After the war, demarcation was clear–– victors, vanquished, victims. Blocs agreed not to compete in certain areas, formed cartels to dominate other markets. Agreed-upon areas of exploitation. Sharing of data. Competition limited to nonvital areas.

“But the war created a lot of vacuums. Vacuums in power, in distribution, in information flow. The Orbitals got sucked into them, and there things weren’t so neat. The borders were...less well defined. There the winners and losers weren’t so easy to see. Now the blocs are tangled in those areas and the result is that the lines of demarcation are undergoing some adjustment. The system is beginning to undergo stress, to radiate fracture lines. Events taking place in the ill-defined areas are having consequences in the rest of the system. A little pressure put here and there, at a critical point...it could make a big difference.” His eyes shift abruptly to face Cowboy.

“That, of course, isn’t my concern,” he says. “I’m planning on keeping in the middle, on the node of the standing waves. I’ve got some information and I’ve got a good sense of how things move. I can ride things out.”

“Keeping in the middle gets you in the crossfire, Reno,” Cowboy says. “Just like Sarah and me.”

“You were never in the middle, Cowboy. None of the deltajockeys ever were. The thirdmen strive for the middle, but rarely reach it.” Reno’s eyes are chill as he raises his prosthetic arm. “
I’m
in the middle. I’m in the middle by my nature, half one thing, half another. I can stand on the node and see the waves rising and collapsing around me. The deltajocks collapsed, Cowboy. You swam off to ride another wave, but it’s going to collapse, too.”

Who is speaking? Cowboy wonders. Reno or that mass of crystal lodged in his skull? Reno is living in the eye-face every moment now, and Cowboy wonders if he’s lost himself in there, if too much of his personality has been sucked into the machine part of him, if control has shifted from his brain to the crystal.

Whiteout
, it’s called.
Rapture of the comp
. It’s not supposed to happen to people like Cowboy and Reno, not to users who know the score, who fly the interface across the terrain of the real world, but it’s a hazard for the theoretical types, artificial intelligence people and physicists, those who are lost in abstracts most of the time. They can confuse the electron image with the reality it images, diffuse themselves through the information net, race at the speed of light along its patterns until their egos fade away, become so thin as to become intangible.

With a shiver Cowboy realizes that Reno is a ghost, a vacant-eyed collection of habits that have lost any purpose except to feed the crystal in his head with the data it needs. Whatever remains of the deltajock is pure reflex.

“These comp hearts are hot,” Cowboy says. “You might want to sit on them for a while.”

Reno shakes his head. “I’m not even going to sell them, not for a long time. I’ll put them in a vault and use them as collateral for a loan from a face bank. I’ll use the loan to enrich my portfolio, and by the time I’ve played with the money for a while, I’ll be able to pay back the loan and then move the comp hearts onto the market. By then this war will be history. ”