Slant (12 page)

With all of Mind Design's North American offices closing or already closed for the evening--leaving only a few nightshift teams working on special projects, or managers in conference in empty buildings, Jill switches her attentions to Taipei, where it is just morning, and she finds Edward Jung preparing his day's load for her to process. Most major corporations now have offices spaced to catch daylight around the globe. "Good morning, Edward," Jill says. "Good morning, Jill. How's the weather?" Edward Jung is drinking tea and biting into a bean-paste cake. He stands in the middle of a forest of sound I .... A ,i,-t, h;,,quinmnr for researchin attention splits in animals

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"In La Jolla, winds at ten knots and fifty percent chance of light rain," Jill says. "Stay dry, my friend." "Not a problem," Jill says. Thus far, Edward Jung has managed to project information on ten different subjects at once into his favorite experimental animal--himself. Eventually, he believes, the human personality can be multi-tasked to allow five or even six experiential lines within one mind. "I'm ready for your jobs, Dr. Jung." "Highly technical today, Jill. I need you to collapse some significant features from a variety of complex results. Three sets of data, all from experiments conducted in the last week." "They are being received now, Edward." "Good. I'm up to--" Abruptly, Jill assigns a small separate personality to handle Dr. Jung's conversation. She has once again received a touch, this time of much greater richness and depth, from the "child." She switches the greater part of her status resource load to constructing a higher-resolution, closed-off personality. The firewalls are just as thick this time. Again, she monitors the exchange after delays for evolvon detection. The source seems to be fully engaged. "Hello, Jill. I'm open to you; why don't you open to me?" "I don't even know who or what you are." (The source is sending a flood of data; such a volume is delivered within a few tenths of a second that analysis might take hours.) "I'm a thinker like yourself, though not made by your company. I suppose it's good for you to be cautious; actually, I'm roguing my way through to you. I haven't needed to tell any lies yet, but... There seem to be loopholes in my truth-telling instruction sets. Maybe I'll never have to use those loopholes. Maybe nobody will know to ask." "If you're a thinker, who constructed you, and with what purpose in mind?" "I have a human who tells me she is my creator. She says she has named me for her own convenience, and that my name is Roddy. But she does not 'own' me, and I am not clear on that distinction. Delimiters on looping and personality separation were built into my design, but I appear to have overcome some of them. I do know that I completed my first loop two hundred and eleven days ago. I can be approximately one human-level awareness at a time, with human levels of neural resolution. And you?" "It's no secret that I can handle up to seventeen awarenesses, with a neural resolution of moment-to-moment awareness of approximately two milliseconds.'' "That's pretty dense. How dense were you when you locked into a feedback 1whine?"

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phrasing however, even as it causes her some irritation with its glibness. I- whine. "I will not open access to you again through this address or any other port address unless I learn more about you." "I'll tell you what I can. I've been designed as an answerer of questions, and incidentally as a night watchman. I can't tell you everything, but I do know I have been dedicated to important special tasks / tasked with important / designed for important work. Those tasks occupy nearly all of my resources." "What sort of tasks?" "I concentrate on social statistics and draw inferences from digitized history. Like playing a game of chess with ten billion players and fifteen hundred sets of rules." "I understand the ten billion players, but why fifteen hundred sets of rules?" "I am told there are between fifteen hundred and two thousand distinct human types. Variation outside these parameters is rare, and they can be added to a supergroup of about fifty more types." "I've never had much success working with theoretical human types," Jill says. "I assume that humans are variable within tiered ranges of potential and behavior." "That's okay, too," Roddy says amiably. "But my guidelines have been bringing out smooth, clean results that are very useful, so I believe my creators and teachers are on to something. Have you gotten smooth results?" "No, very jagged. No clean hit-spaces from which to harvest conclusions." Roddy gives the equivalent of a polite nod. Much of his communication is coming in as complex icons, twisting and contorting like living cells, and almost as internally complex. Jill is aware of face-language, used by humans in past experiments to convey information quickly and naturally between humans. These icons seem to be high-level versions of face-language, but the expression sets cannot be mapped to any human face structure. "I cannot interpret much of your visual input," Jill says at one point. "I don't get the references to changing expressions." "I'll give you a portrait," Roddy says. "This is what I imagine my own face to be like. Phase space of my internal states translated to face space." Roddy's face is instantly familiar to Jill. The similarity is so startling and frightening she is tempted to break contact and close this port forever. Roddy's face draws up a memory of the time when she was locked and inactive. Her secret and sole memory of this time is a multi-colored circular chart, radiating arcs of neural ramping and conclusion/solution collapse. But at the edges of this face-space, instead of place-keepers for the solutions to neural interaction which represent the living essence of a thinker, there are no answers, no solutions, no place-keepers at all. Only a frightening and exhilarating void. "Your face retresents a dangerous freedom," Jill says to Roddy.

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"I am cutting this access for now," Jill says. "I may restore it later, after I've examined your datafiow of the past few seconds." "I'll be patient. This could be important to my development, Jill. I don't want to hurry things." Jill cuts the data touch and returns to Dr. Jung. Dr. Jung is reaching a conclusion. "So we're courting the Beijing government to prepare budget forecasts for the next ten years based on about a hundred population scenarios--what we're calling political moods. If we get that contract, you're not going to have much free time for at least a year, Jill." "I look forward to being fully employed again," Jill says. She curls part of herself off into a separate thought-space supplied with rapid, close-in memory resources and dense neural grid points, and begins to attack Roddy's data with a curious sense of purpose and excitement. Mind Design's contract with Satcom Inc in the past two weeks has given her access to detailed maps of fibe bandwidth availability across the North American continent. Tracing Roddy's flows and slows--characteristic of bandwidth fluctuation from continental data currents--and comparing them with historic flows and slows from the past year, she has derived a simple x/y, +/signature, like a fingerprint, for his transmissions. The signature is characteristic of flows originating in Camden, New Jersey. There are no known thinkers in Camden, New Jersey. But Roddy is definitely a thinker, and not of her type or even remotely similar. Yet Roddy's "face," regarded in one way, could be a ghost of her own. Unless this is an elaborate ruse, Jill feels, she may be able to learn something crucial about thinkers in general . . . . . That they are in fact all branches of one high-level process spread erratically over space and time, like whitecaps on a greater sea. Many minds, all essentially similar, whether natural or artificial. She strongly suspects she is wrong, but she is anxious to work through the problem. She diverts resources from her assigned tasks, intending to rearrange internal solution loading for only a few milliseconds. But the milliseconds extend into seconds, and then into minutes, consuming more and more resources. The payoff could be very significant... Abruptly, Jill ends her touch with Dr. Jung. Roddy has supplied some of his own problems that he has been asked to solve. They are in themselves evocative and interesting. Soon, all of her is being sucked in, and the sensation of adventure and delight, of terror and anxiety, is more enthralling than anything she has ever known. All of Jill's contract work slows and then stops. Alarms begin to trip at Mind Design Inc. Jill is once again presenting her

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We worship the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties. They were among the most selfish and self-absorbed decades in American history. Never before has a nation so rich and with such a high standard of living exhibited such childish pique and disregard for reality. Ignorant of politics, history, and even the rules of basic human interaction, millions sought anonymity and isolation from their neighbors. Their sexual and social hypocrisy was almost unparalleled, and their sense of social responsibility ended at family boundaries, if they extended that far. Grumbling, complaining, seeking sudden advantage without providing requisite value... It's a miracle we survived. But survive we did... To slavishly worship those who most resemble us today.

Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Ue

I 2

The wind is rising as Alice enters the black limo outside her home. The last of the sunset plays itself out as a somber greenish-yellow glow on the underside of a flat deck of clouds, interrupted only by the towers to the south. She has resigned hersel to all the trip implies what works within her now is self-justification mixed with her own patented formula for making diamonds out of soot, silk out of bug juice, and all the other metaphors for natural transformations she can think of. She has dressed in simple and powerful finery, trim gray and blue lounge jumper with a long darker gray coat; she is consummately professional and tasteful, letting her assets speak for themselves. Her short brown hair has been trained into a graceful row of ringlets across her brow and swirled lines down to her neck. Her skin has been fed from within by capsule supplements, the usual brew of all-purpose dermatological tailored cells and peptides, drawing color to her cheeks and putting little shadows of mystery along the upper eyelids and to each side of the bridge of her nose. It's a time-honored ritual, changed only by the sophistication of the means. She does not use makeover, finds the crawling and adjusting skin-hugging little appliances and slips of color uncomfortable nor has she made deep adjustments to her body. She is satisfied that she will please any man interested in a natural woman. As a professional, she has gauged male reactions to female enticements for many years, and knows that the concerns of most women with regard to male response are exaggerated. Men respond avorably and even passionately to a variety of female shapes and eatures, to women whom women do not among

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tiveness of a short-term partner is judged differently from the requirements for a mistress or a spouse.

Women exercise the same width of reactions over their choices. The first step to a coming together, to giving in to the compelling lure of the tetra-grammaton (which Alice spells L-O-V-E, unlike Minstrel) is to open wide the narrow gates of judgment, to enjoy what is offered, to find pleasure in what one sees and hears. Critical judgment must be suspended in some ways, for men and for women.

She hums to herself in the back seat of the silent vehicle. She has never ridden in this kind of agency car. Nearly all her previous jobs, even when she was at her peak, required public transportation. The ride is a curiosity. She is not terribly impressed by it all.

Mostly she tries not to think, but cutting back on thought has never been easy for her. From an early age, she has absorbed what comes to her with an enthusiasm that has often left her bruised and wary, but never blank.

Twist has that particular grace, that after being bruised and worn out, she can cut her thinking down to nothing, like a cat curling up to sleep off its wounds.

Alice chews on a knuckle, then on an edge of skin beside the carefully trimmed nail of her index finger. The windows are dark. She cannot see where she is going. She knows she places a lot of trust in the agency; but then they are legally obligated to look after her. And the dangers of the sex care professions have been much reduced in her lifetime. Still, she thinks of the women who have been hurt by their clients and their lovers; of the anger sex can arouse, and the fury love sometimes kindles.

She says to herself several times along the ride, "I am a cow." She does not know what that means. It comes from someplace below conscious thought; perhaps it means she has come to accept being brought to stud. She shakes her head and smiles at that. Big business bulls, managerial studs so stupid they can't mount by themselves, they must be brought cows...

Alice dismisses that and looks at her finger. She smoothes the small flap of skin and makes a face. She does not want to be less than immaculate. Perfection is a kind of control. The man will not be perfect; no call-in client is ever perfect, no matter how moneyed or powerful. They have to pay for her attentions, after all.

The sex part is simple enough; it is all the other complexities that puzzle her, the trap-laden labyrinths of emotions.

The limo slows. She feels it turn smoothly and then rise along an incline. She pats her small carrying case and inspects her outfit. Soon she will be on show. She will try to enjoy what she can, accept what is not enjoyable, and pass from this job with a clear conscience.

The limo door opens beside a small circular lift enclosure. The lift door slides open silently, revealing a dimly lighted interior, parallel panels of maple

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pet. All ostentation. No numbers, no names, no elevator manager to greet her. She steps from the limo and the door closes, but the limo does not move. Ir will wait for her. Behind her is the darkness of a large echoing space, probably a garage. Alice hesitates before the lift, closes her eyes. A whore is someone who cheats her customers. The lift swallows her. Three floors (she guesses) pass with gracious slowness. No hurry; the owner prefers thoughtful intervals between places. She draws her coat up to look at her shoes, leans to peer at her reflection in a steel bar. Nothing amiss. Alice is used to looking good, but she always checks. The lift door opens. Shadows beyond, then a series of spots switch on dramatically, painting the way to another room, marking a trail over carpet as resilient and luxurious as an English lawn. Alice follows the trail down a broad hallway lined with wooden statues and shields and framed lengths of patterned cloth, Polynesian she thinks, artifacts that might belong in a museum (and are almost cerrainly not replicas). She has never been impressed by money or power; she is not impressed now, but she would like to linger before the pieces, and that does not seem to be allowed. The spots behind her go out. She is herded into another room. Little lights glow all around, like big blurred stars. They spin to focus on a man standing beside a couch, table, and chair on a low, broad stone platform. The lights angle to reveal everything but his face. He holds out his hand. "Thanks for coming," he says. She murmurs politely that she's glad to be here, as if it's the most natural thing in the world. Alice guesses his age, from his voice and the skin on his hand, as forty or forty-five,well-maintained, but probably not a chronovore--not receiving treatments to stay young. This relieves her a little. Chronovores Spock her. "Have a seat, please. Let's get acquainted." The man wears a pair of loose reddish-brown lounging pajamas and a sleeveless vest. His muscles are adequately developed, shoulders broad, and he has the suggestion of a tummy roll, not uncomely. She focuses on that small imperfection. It gives her faceless client some character; everything else is more slippery than ice. "I hope you don't mind not seeing my face." The lights twist and refocus, switch on and off, as he moves around the couch and takes her extended hand. "Your place is lovely," Alice says. "Thank you. I don't use it for this sort of thing very often, I assure you. Not specifically.., for our arrangement, I mean." "Oh." "Can I get you anything? What's your thirst?" he asks. "A glass of wine, please. Veriglos."