Infinite Dreams (16 page)

Within a week, the man who had been Harrison was living in a high-class flat behind the protection of the East Village wall, with enough money stacked away to buy him time to think.

He didn’t want to be Harrison again, that he knew for sure. Besides the boredom of living the same life over, he had known (as Harrison) by the time he was fifty that his existence was not a particularly happy one, physically addicted to the accumulation of wealth and power, incapable of trusting or being trusted.

Besides, Harrison was a five-year-old in Arkansas, just
beginning the two decades of bad luck that would precede a century of nothing going wrong.

He had this sudden cold feeling.

He went to the library and looked up microfiches of the past few years’
Forbes
and
Bizweek
. And found out who he was, by omission.

For less than a thousand dollars, he gave himself a past. A few documents to match counterfeit inserts in government data banks. Then a few seemingly illogical investments in commodities, that made him a millionaire in less than a year. Then he bought a failing electronics firm and renamed it after himself: Lassiter Electronics.

He grew a beard that he knew would be prematurely white.

The firm prospered. He bought a plastics plant and renamed it Lassiter Industries. Then the largest printing out-fit in Pennsylvania. A fishery after that.

In 2010 he contrived to be in a waterfront crap game in Galveston, where he lost a large sum to a hard-eyed boy who was fairly good at cold-rolling dice. Lassiter was better, but he rolled himself crapouts. It was two days after Harrison’s twentieth birthday, and his first big break.

A small bank, then a large one. An aerospace firm. Textiles. A piece of an orbital factory: micro-bearings and data crystals. Now named Lassiter, Limited.

In 2018, still patiently manufacturing predestination, he hired young D. Thorne Harrison as a time-and-motion analyst, knowing that all of his credentials were false. It would give Harrison access to sensitive information.

By 2021 he was Junior Vice-President in charge of production. By 2022, Vice-President. Youngest member of the board, he knew interesting things about the other board members.

In 2024, Harrison brought to Lassiter’s office documents
proving that he had voting control of 51% of Lassiter, Limited. He had expected a light. Instead, Lassiter made a cash settlement, perplexingly small, and dropped out of sight.

With half his life left to live, and money enough for much longer, Lassiter bought comfortable places in Paris, Key West, and Colorado, and commuted according to the weather and season. He took a few years for a leisurely trip around the world. His considerable mental energies he channeled into the world of art, rather than finance. He became an accomplished harpsichordist, and was well-known among the avant-garde for his neopointillist constructions: sculptures of frozen light, careful laser bursts caught in a cube of photosensitive gel. Beautiful women were fascinated by this man who had done so well in two seemingly antagonistic fields.

He followed Harrison’s fortunes closely: the sell-out in 2030, buying out the Adams-Beeson drive (which seemed like a reckless long shot to most observers), sinking a fortune in the Moon and getting it back a hundredfold.

And as the ecologic catalyzers were being seeded on Mars, Harrison an old man running out of years to buy, Lassiter lay dying in Key West:

In the salt breeze on an open veranda, not wanting to clutter up his end with IV tubes and rushing attendants and sterile frigid air, he had sent his lone nurse away on an errand that would take too long, his last spoken words calm and reassuring, belying the spike of pain in his chest. The house downstairs was filled with weeping admirers, friends he had not bought, and as the pale blue sky went dark red, he reckoned himself a happy man, and wondered how he would do it next time, thinking he was the puppeteer, even as the last string was pulled.

For three semesters I did graduate work in computer science at the University of Maryland, so it was inevitable, perhaps unfortunately, that sooner or later I’d write a story with a computer as the main character. This is it.

In terms of action, this is probably the most complicated story I’ve ever written, even though most of the action is just electrons slipping to and fro. I was a little concerned that it might be
too
complicated, but it did sell, and to a good market.

I took the story to a writers’ conference in Baltimore—six or seven of us who met every few months to tear each other’s work apart—and didn’t expect any mercy, since we were fairly savage with one another (in a friendly way, oh yes), and it seemed to me that a story about a computer would be pretty vulnerable to sarcasm.

To my surprise, everyone liked it. I was so pleased that I got careless, and explained to them what the underlying structure of it was.

For the rest of the week, it was “Joe’s God-damned Boolean algebra story.”

L. Henry Kennem put a tiny speck of Ultramarine Blue into the gob of white on his palette. He mashed it around until it was thoroughly mixed, and smiled. Perfect for the underside.

Henry was painting a gesso-on-gesso picture of a pile of eggs in a white bowl on a white saucer, on a white table-top, lit uniformly from every side. It was a
tour-de-force
of technique; though an uncharitable observer might have pointed out that from any distance greater than three feet, it was only a slightly smudged white canvas.

But Henry was untouched by the foibles of critics, more immune than any artist in any less perfect age could have been. For in the Citizen’s Capitalism of America (and about everywhere else, for that matter), he was a
painter
, by damn—Occupational Code 509 827 63; Artist, paints, free-lance—and he got a government check every two weeks for doing what he had shown the most aptitude for, twenty years ago at the magic age of fourteen. All he had to do, to keep off the relief rolls, was produce at least one painting a year.

He’d already done his painting this year, and it made
him feel like a very good citizen to be doing another. This one was quite a challenge, too; Henry hadn’t seen a real egg in many years—his paycheck was adequate but not enough to justify buying gourmet food—and, disdaining photographs, he was working from memory. His eggs were a little too spherical.

The door chimed softly and Henry gave a gentle curse and set his palette under the no-dry field. He kept the brush in his hand and went to answer the door.

The viewer showed three men in business clothes—dark blue capes and matching jocstraps—maybe customers, looking for something to brighten up their office. Henry thought of the twenty-eight canvases languishing unsold in his study and how nice it would be to splurge and buy an egg. He composed his features into a look of quiet interest and thumbed the door open.

“Louis Henry Kennem?” The short fellow in the middle did the talking, while the other two stared.

“Yes, indeed, sirs. What can I do for you?”

“Government business,” the little one said and produced a card-badge with the legend “Occupational Classification Board”. “We have some good news for you.”

“Oh—well, come in, come in.” Good news, maybe. The two big fellows didn’t look like harbingers of joy. They walked in silently, as if on oiled bearings, expressions never changing as they took in the carefully-planned disorder of his living room-studio.

“Can I get you gentlemen coffee or something?”

“No, thank you. We won’t be long. Neither will you, as a matter of fact. You’re to come with us.” He plopped down on the sofa-roll. “Please have a seat.” The other two remained standing. Henry had a strong impulse to bolt out the door, but instead he perched on a neowood sawhorse.

“Uh, why is the OCB interested in me?”

“As I say, it’s good news. You’re going to be a very wealthy man.”

“I’m not … being reclassified, am I?” Henry couldn’t imagine being anything other than Artist, paints, freelance. Besides, some of the highest-paying jobs were unpleasant in the extreme; like Sewage Inspector or Poison Tolerance Control Engineer.

“No, nothing like that, uh, not really—” the man took a blue envelope out of his cape pocket and fiddled with it. “Your Occupational Code remains the same, and you’ll be painting again in another year. But for one year, you’ve been selected to serve on jur—”

“Jury duty!” Henry half-jumped, half-fell off the sawhorse. Two hundred staring pounds of muscle slid into position between him and the door. “You can’t … I can’t—you can’t plug me into that machine for a year! I’ll go crazy—everybody does!”

“Now, now, Mr. Kennem,” the man got up smiling and his cronies produced handcuffs. “Surely you don’t believe all that nonsense. Why, nobody in the world is more comfortable than a cyborg juror. All your physical needs taken care of automatically, a good responsible job with high pay, eight companions as intelligent and qualified as you—”

“But I’m
not
qualified! I don’t know anything but painting. I don’t want to
do
anything but paint.”

“Now, don’t run yourself down, Mr. Kennem. Out of the eighty million people in Balt-Washmond, Central chose
you
as the one most qualified to replace the outgoing juror.”

“The machine made a mistake, then. The jury runs the whole
city
—I can’t even manage my own—”

One of the heavies jingled his cuffs suggestively. “Come on, Mr. Harris. Gonna be after five by the time we
get back to the office.” He looked as if the long speech had made his face hurt.

“Right, Sam. Look, Mr. Kennem, we can talk about it on the flyer. Why don’t you just cooperate and come along?” Henry went quietly.

The Baltimore-Washington-Richmond Complex was a monument to scientific city planning. Growing methodically from the rubble of the Second American Revolution, the planners left nothing to chance or human weakness. There was no “urban sprawl”; slums were simply not allowed. The three cities had ideally fixed populations; and everybody whose presence Central (the Central Planning and Maintenance Computer Facility) decreed not essential to the city’s functions, was compelled to live in the exurban lowrises. Henry lived in one such, Fernwood, about fifty air-miles west of the center of Washington. Only those chosen to be very wealthy could afford to live above ground.

As the flyer skimmed its silent way to Washington, Henry saw a few such above-ground dwellings, their lawns irregular patches of green, looking out of place, disturbing the geometric regularity of the produce fields that rolled from horizon to horizon. He couldn’t understand why anybody would purposely expose himself to weather when he could live in a totally controlled underground environment. He was only half-listening to Mr. Harris.

“… it’s ridiculous for you to say you aren’t qualified. Central considers all citizens with IQ’s between 130 and 140—and
any
person with that level of intelligence can fulfill the cyborg function. But jurors are chosen for many other qualities, beside intelligence.”

“My pretty blue eyes,” he said, looking out the window.

“Now, Mr. Kennem, there’s no need to be sarcastic.” Henry was getting very annoyed at Harris’s habit of addressing
him by name every other sentence. “You should be very proud. Of all the people intelligent enough—”

“But not
too
intelligent.”

“—out of all of them, the machine decided you were the one least likely to misuse the power a juror has.”

“I don’t
want
power! I want to paint and be left alone.”

“That is precisely it.”

“Thanks. Lack of ambition. Sure is a lot to be proud of.”

It was cold in the tank. Some part of his brain knew that he was floating in slime, naked as an embryo, totally helpless. That part of his brain knew that the crown of his skull had been excised and stored somewhere; that from the eyebrows up he was a complicated mass of grey and blue tissue interwoven with fine wires, microcircuitry, sensors … and it would have been frightening, had he been allowed to fear.

He couldn’t see himself, or feel anything but the cold, or hear the faint susurrus of fluid cycling through the tank.

The part of his brain that used to see was earmarked for TRAFFIC CONTROL.

The part of his brain that used to feel took care of POPULATION DENSITY AND EPIDEMIOLOGICAL RESEARCH.

The part of his brain that used to be hooked to his ears, SUPPLY AND DEMAND REDUNDANCY CHECK or sometimes RESOURCE PROJECTION ANALYSIS.

A well-determined matrix was like the smell of butter-cups (he had never smelled a buttercup before). A differential equation with ambivalent initial conditions felt like an itch in the middle of his back, where he couldn’t reach. Tensors sang like harps and algebra was more basic to him than love had ever been.

He knew he had once been Louis Henry Kennem but now he was INTERFACE FOUR and he had a splitting headache.

Your head will ache for a year, said FIVE, speaking in cultured accents of Boolean algebra.

If you can hold out for a year, said EIGHT.

The old FOUR only made it four months, said FIVE.

But you can do it, we have great confidence in you, said SIX, just a hint of sarcasm in the third-order harmonic.

Go fuck a solenoid, said THREE, give the new guy a chance.

I’ve got to get out of here, thought FOUR. But his thoughts weren’t private. He hadn’t learned how yet.

Just walk away, said EIGHT.

Swim, said SIX.

You’re in charge of TRAFFIC CONTROL, said EIGHT. Call yourself a flyer.

Everybody quiet down and get back to work, said ONE. And everybody did. ONE was INTERFACE CONTROL MONITOR, among other things.

After a while, FOUR learned how to isolate the entity that was Henry. This was necessary so that Henry could think without being monitored—by FOUR as well as the others; when Henry thought, it gave FOUR what can only be described as a headache.

FOUR was allocated many more storage and logic circuits than he needed for the 246 duties he performed. It was no trick at all for FOUR to link up a bit from here and a bit from there and a bushel-basket full from BUDGET ANALYSIS 1985, and patch together a Henry analogue. He did this just one microsecond after he saw it was possible.