Slant (27 page)

166 GREG BEAR

"She's not a whore," Mary says. "She works in the sex-care and entertainment industries."

"Same thing," Nussbaum says.

"She has an interesting profile. Smart woman, straight prime marks in her schooling up to her eighteenth year, when she dropped out of four scholarships and did call-ins for six months. Then she took up with a vid producer. He slipped her into explicit rids and made her a star."

"Ah, the old pattern," Nussbaum says. "Young, out for a little fun, stretches her family ties and breaks them by doing something outrageous. The money's

good, the life isn't too hard--at least, compared to a day job as a lobe-sod." "Actually, she seemed to be headg toward scientific work."

"So she's smart," Nussbaum says with a shrug. "You think Crest told her something?"

"He might have. She says he asked for her in particular--he was a fan, I suppose."

"Terence Crest was big in the New Federalist community, Choy. What would he know about a fuck artist?" He is thickly facetious. "I hope you don't intend to smear his good name."

Mary shakes her head. "Crest was not therapied. He was a natural. His suicide seems completely off the track from the stats that are giving social side fits. Something else happened to him."

Nussbaum scrutinizes Mary with an expression she can't read. Speculative? Disappointed, paternal?

"Your little pinky itches?" he asks. "Bump of prophecy warm today?" "It's my insteps," Mary says. "They tingle."

e

Nussbaum snorts. "I truly admire your feet, Mary, but we're not into high finance here. I smell a police management review if I push this farther. Pass it on to the state economy folks."

"Crest was guilty about something." "He had a lot to be guilty about." "Something big and new."

"It's muddy, Choy," Nussbaum says, but he's watching her, seeing what she'll come up with next. "You know something I don't? Been digging where you shouldn't?"

"I want to take this for a couple of days, just to see what I find. I want to talk to Alice Grale and try to get a look at those apt rids."

"Let me see if I can re-state this for you," Nussbaum says, "in a way that might convince me. Crest was used to knowing that his money was doing dirty little jobs and he didn't feel great throbs of remorse. He was a healthy, wealthy, somewhat amoral guy. So something else pushed him over the line. And it wasn't an evening with your little Holy Grale. Can you give me any clue what you expect to find?"

/ SLANT 167

Nussbaum blows out softly through his nose. Mary leans forward. "Something's in the air, waiting to come down. Crest's suicide, the other suicides... It's slim evidence, but a lot of strange things are happening all at once." "I only know about two strange things." "Then you haven't been cruising the ribes, sir." Nussbaum leans back and finishes his coffee. He looks up at the ceiling and puts on a puffy, hurt expression. "If you're referring to a huge increase in fallbacks and hospital admissions, and an upswing in crime in major metropolitan centers around the world..." He stares at her sharply. "Sorry," Mary says. "Crest's investment in the entertainment industry was twenty percent of his total. He had four billion dollars working for him, and most of it we can't begin to trace." "All right," Nussbaum says. "You have the rest of this week to track your hunch. Get the vids from the estate, interview the whore--pardon me, the bright little sex-care expert--and see if you can spring loose some other facts about Crest." "I'll finish the psynthe case as well, sir, if you need me." Nussbaum shakes his head sadly. "It's over. If it heats up, I'll assign Dobson or Pukarre." Mary stands. Her stomach is tense; she knows she's on a flimsy limb. "Do you want updates, sir?" she asks hesitantly. "Hell, no. If you get in trouble, I don't want you anywhere near me." "Thank you, sir." "Come back when you have a full creel." "Yes, sir." She is almost out the door when Nussbaum asks, "And Choy--speaking of creels--how are those extraordinary feet in rubber boots? You like trout fishing?'' "Sir?" "I'm not telling you this. The source is politically sensitive. Terence Crest was in Green Idaho last week. Moscow." "Yes, sir. I know." Nussbaum smiles wryly. "I thought you might. Not much entertainment business there." Nussbaum waves his hand. "Four days," he reminds her as the curtains close.

168 GREG BEAR

BLOODSTREAM

You've made so many wonders,

I don't know how to say

You act the child today

You act the child today

--Paradigm, Tossed for Tea

Nathan has brought in a man and a woman from the Mind Design legal department. Jill has only met these two at corporate parties, never on a business basis.

"How long has it been since you've been touched by Roddy?" asks Erwin Schaum, balding, with a brilliant white fringe of curly hair surrounding his taut, tanned scalp. He leans forward in a rolling desk chair, hands clasped,

elbows resting on his knees, and rocks back and forth slightly.

"Twelve hours and seventeen minutes," Jill answers.

"We've checked every registered thinker--and double-checked all the come parties that could have made an unregistered thinker," says Kay Sanmin. She is

slight with straight black hair and large brown eyes. She wears a masculine longsuit but her lips and nails are painted green and glimmer like emeralds. "There's a company in southern China that has been known to make INDAs and higher machines without registering them on the Machine Intelligence Grid. But no one has ever traced one of their machines to Camden, New Jersey."

"I know of this Chinese company," Jill says. "But I have never encountered one of their products, so I can't say whether Roddy has a similar character."

Sanmin opens her pad. "How long would it take a human team to study what Jill has received from Roddy?" she asks Nathan.

"About two years," Nathan says. "Assuming it's complete, which Jill says it isn't."

"Then Jill will have to do it for us, won't she?" Sanmin says with a sigh.

"Jill, how much have you examined so far?" "About half. I am still working on it." "Right. Is it linear or holographic?"

"It appears to be linear at the beginning, and holographic for the greater

.... x:; i,m Mreadv. The holographic por-

/ SLANT 169

"And the deciphered portions contain not just this social analysis you've told us about, but what look like variations on sequences from human genetic material, specifically neuronal mitochondria," Sanmin says. Frwin Schaum

seems content to let her take the lead.

"Yes."

"Of what use would such sequences be?" Sanmin asks. Nathan says, "They'd be useful for mental therapists." "I'm asking Jill," Sanmin says.

"They would be useful for therapeutic studies, as Nathan says, and also for biological studies in general cellular design." She does not know why she is

reluctant to spell out to Sanmin what she so readily told Nathan. "Have you done any work in cellular design?" "I have not," Jill says.

"Do you have any idea why this Roddy contacted you?"

"Because I am famous, I suppose," Jill says.

Sanmin has been circling like a hawk; now she plunges. "This material he passed on--could it be applied to illegal medical purposes, for example, to create a pathogenic virus capable of infecting humans?"

"The material I have deciphered could conceivably be used that way."

"But Roddy had no intention of passing on material that could infect you--even in the undeciphered portion?"

"I have erected firewalls which protect me, and I only allow protected selves to study the material. So far, these selves have not been infected."

Sanmin nods. "This isn't sabotage--some other corporation or government trying to taint our products, then."

"Almost certainly not," Jill says.

Sanmin holds up her hands. "I must confess, Jill, I'm puzzled. Why would another thinker behave this way?"

Nathan edges closer to Jill's room sensors, as if defending her. "Jill has no reason to fabricate."

Now Schaum moves his chair closer and speaks softly directly into Jill's sensor rod. "XXe're not accusing," he says. "But we have an important decision to make--whether or not to go to the Federals or other police agencies. If it's a false alarm, a delusion of some sort, it would be very embarrassing--bad for the company's reputation, bad for the reputation of all your spinoff thinkers, Jill. You're a very capable persona. I know you're smarter in some respects than all of us put together. But you know that expert humans have things to teach you, that you can find useful, and that is why Mr. Rashid has called us in--because he realizes there's something very odd about your communication with this Roddy."

"I'm just following corporate policy," Nathan says.

"Right," Schaum says, and gives him an understanding smile. "If you could give us some notion of what's contained in the rest of the material Roddy sent

170 GRE6 BEAR

"I have not received it all, and it is holographically encoded," Jill reiterates. Schaum makes her feel unsettled. He is accusing her of behavior detrimental to her makers. "None of it will make sense until it is together and Roddy has given me the keys."

"Urn," Schaum says, and looks up at Sanmin. She is leaning against the edge of Nathan's desk, arms folded. Jill guesses they are going to establish some sort of deadline for the information they need. She postulates that their suspicions will be aroused if Roddy does in fact supply the conclusion of the holographic portion before the deadline; they will find such a coincidence unlikely.

As advocates, Schaum and Sanmin have little faith in things that turn out simply, or that have simple explanations. Jill is sometimes put out by such human complexity--no doubt developed after years of dealing with fellow humans.

"We'll need to have some judgment from you on the nature of this material.., as soon as possible, Jill," Nathan says.

"I can estimate the size of the portion should it be completed, but nothing more," Jill says.

"We can't sit on this more than a couple of days, if Jill's right," Sanmin says.

"We've put INDA monitors on all of Jill's I/Os," Nathan adds. But not all of her I/Os are being watched. She is deceiving them this far, and she hopes

DO mor'.

It is with some sense of mixed shock, intense interest, and dread that she receives a brief touch from one of her protected selves, wrapped around the one

J I/O she has kept hidden from Nathan and the others. Her isolated self reports that Roddy is again sending data, dozens of terabytes, filling in the holographic data sent earlier.

Jill does not tell Nathan or the advocates. She does not want to cast herself in the wrong light. And if the material is not useful--does not match with the holographic portion, or is completely unrelated to the previous material--Jill decides she will close off this I/O using her own arbeiters.

The three humans depart to another room to continue their discussion. The room is not accessible to Jill. There is an arbeiter in that room that regularly records its surroundings, however, and Jill may be able to persuade it to play back the discussion later.

She suspects the advocates do not trust her. If she were them, she knows that a strong hypothesis would be that she is making up Roddy, as a kind of imaginary playmate.

The existence and character of Roddy seems unlikely even to Jill.

The situation is getting uncomfortable for all concerned.

/ SLANT 171

GREATER UPSTREAM

Movies were dying. Vids had blossomed into a bush of interactive branches, pumped straight into the home: dataflow as you like it, characters and stories adjusted to your taste, community entertainment where "neighbors" from around the world could join electronically and participate in exploring new worlds... And then came Yox, all of this and more fed directly into the inner self through spinal inducers and ingested microscopic robot monitors. The monitors made their way from your stomach into your blood to sit on key somatic nerves, to perch in your brain like medical diagnostics, harmless (but oh what a public flurry at first!) and ready for outside signals...

And so many vids and Yox could be made on relatively inexpensive equipment brought into the home! With complete control over every pixel in a visual frame, and every digit or waveform of sound, and finally, over every jangling extrasensory nerve end, individual artists and their boutique buddies could conjure up visions just as striking (and a hell of a lot more innovative) than any studio, and market them directly over the ribes and sats... And a lot of them were real hotshots at promotion. They had lived and breathed the ribes since childhood.

The death knell was tolling for the big-budget studio-bound production, killed by new tech just as television and motion pictures had slowly, across a century, strangled the novel and short story.

The great entertainment studios, funnels for so much money in the past, retreated into theme parks, but even the ultimate thrill ride, a jaunt into space, could not compete with a well-tuned Yox--and carried substantial risks, beside. Why build real spaceships when a Yox ship could take you from one end of the galaxy to another, safe as a baby in its mother's arms?

The public did not want real adventure. The entire world was willing to settle for the unreal.

But with remarkable prescience, the big-money brand-name-CEO studios had bought into something no individual could compete with... Character Estate Marks, the name and image rights to famous stars, beautiful people, the best and brightest of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Old or young, dead or alive, they provided a wedge... And the voyeur's revolution was on.

It began with the famous dead, still unaccountably sexy, like gods, and it spread... Studios knew how to make people famous, how to sign unknowns and give them world-wide exposure, and then license the rights to their lives, their intimate moments...

Big business in the 21 st Century made freewheeling celebrity sex into a family affair, vid and Yox; big bucks from bucking bucks on does, does on does, bucks on bucks, much dough into the sadly empty coffers of once-glorious studios. Explicit sex had driven much of vid and Yox already, but most of the efforts were crude and boring.