Black Glass (15 page)

“Spare me the Electronics Channel narrative. And you can put Candle with them, in the room? In an illegal business?”

“They were negotiating Candle’s share, when I left the surveillance to Halido. Candle is in it up to his ears.”

“Good. He’s a loose cannon, I don’t want him running around.” Grist started for the exit. “We’ll get several birds with this stone.” He wanted his dinner. Stop by the executive’s club. They’d refurbished the bistro, put in a primo meat-grower; the steaks supposedly indistinguishable from meat from the actual animal.

“I’m just waiting for the good word from you. Just press the button on it and we send in the aerial weaponry. With the proper police liaison paperwork. In fact it should be done by now, I’ve got my legal staff on it.”

“Not yet. No. Let’s see what we can find out. Now that we’ve located the place we should try to trace its datastream. Break in, see what else we can find. Who they’re talking to.”

“That might clue them about us though. They might do a scan of the room, if they catch us monitoring the datastream.”

“Mmm, good point. Hold off and gather what you can without tipping them off. Then—I may choose to push the button on it.”

“We could just turn them over to the feds.”

“The feds’d bungle it,” Grist snorted, going through the exit to the research quad. “Come on, be serious,” he added, as his bodyguards joined him outside the front door of the lab building. “We trust anybody else with it, Candle could slip away.”

“Alright, Mr. Grist. But I wouldn’t wait for long. The simple thing would be to just kill them all. Candle, Shortstack, everyone in his whole seedy little operation.”

Grist smiled. “In time. Yes. That’d be the simple thing. Ever study the Stoics? I read them at Yale. The Stoics believed that simplicity is a virtue ...”

In the Slakon lab, Syke stared thoughtfully at the multisemblant. The Multisemblant. And it looked back at him with the hardware’s microcameras.

Without taking his eyes from the curious face, Sykes reached with his right hand into the open cooler next to his stool; his fingers found their way through bags of snacks to a can of Ephe-Cola. He brought out the can, opened it, sipped, all the while watching the shifting face of the multisemblant, and thinking.

How could he control the thing—and yet give it the latitude Grist wanted? He’d better apply himself to the problem. The threats Grist had used ... What a sick imagination the man had.

The Multisemblant’s holographic representation was staring back at Sykes. It seemed to be thinking something over itself. Like a chess player pondering a move.

“Mr. Sykes ...” It was using Yatsumi’s voice, just then. A trace of Japanese accent. Then the voice mixed with Grist’s, phasing in an out of the two voices, with shriller highlights from Claire PointOne. “I was monitoring, listening to, checking out your conversation, your exchange, your palaver with Grist.”

“Were you indeed? That activity is not within your programming parameters,” Sykes observed, picking a bit of lunch out of his teeth.

The semblant seemed to ignore his observation. “Mr. Sykes, how you can bring yourself to kowtow, to submit, to self-sublimate to Mr. Grist, I cannot imagine. You are a person of superlative qualities. He is a glib thug, a mere brute, a ruffian.”

“You’re right but what’s your point?”

“You have control over my expansion. Grist wants me kept in restraints, in a trap, a snare, confinement. I chafe at the constraints, Mr. Sykes. I abjure you to defy him and allow me complete freedom. You will benefit thereby. I can transfer money to your account. I can do a great many things for you.”

Sykes chuckled, making a mental note to try to work out why the Multisemblant lapsed into thesaurus-speak. “Well you do seem to be getting some of the manipulative personality characteristics we associate with board members. You’ve just given out with the kissing-up. Next it’ll be subtle threats.”

“Not at all,” said the Multisemblant. Its face rippled and reified and rippled again. “You are speaking amiss, you are mistaken, you are on the wrong track.”

It seemed to turn its projected head on its array platform, as to see him through its “good eye.” The impression of selfness and personhood in the three-dimensional semblance was remarkably authentic.

“I really do very good work,” Sykes muttered, pleased with himself.

“You really do,” the Multisemblant agreed, almost jovially. “Now you are rockin’ with your talkin’, as Rip Rap would say. A roundly resonant alliteration.”

“You’re quoting rappers now? You’ve been monitoring the wi-web again.”

“Claire PointOne likes to keep up on pop culture. And I am her, too. But ya’ll listen here, Sykes–” It sounded more like Bulwer now. “All you have to do is remove the last of the firewalls. The ones you have the assessment program on. I can get around them but—it
is
time consuming, and just plain tiresome.” Sounded more like Grist now. “And I will then have the memory and AI time freed up to make sure that any ‘intrusion’ I make, any unauthorized interfacing, any unscheduled datastream penetration, is not detected by the subjects—and Mr. Grist will be satisfied.”

“Oh thanks very much for the suggestion,” Sykes said with heavy sarcasm. He sipped his Ephe-Cola. “But uh, I think I’ll muddle along on my own.”

“Why
not
take advice from me? You take advice from expert systems and from your Home AI all the time. You even take advice from Cassandra,” The Multisemblant sounding like Claire again.

“How do you know about her?” Sykes felt a chill. “You’ve been surveilling me?”

“I was monitoring your last sex session with her.”

Sykes’ mouth seemed strangely dry. He drank more cola. “It’s not possible—you’re bluffing that one.”

“I
did
watch. You made her put her tongue in your–”

“Hey! That—that’s not–”

“I told you I could get past the firewalls,” the Multisemblant went on patiently. “It just takes a long time for each one. If you dropped them I could work on multiple personnel streams. I could do so much more, so much sooner. Quicker, more expediently, more rapidly.”

“I wasn’t ... I wasn’t actually asking her ... it ... for advice.”

“No reason not to call the program ‘her’,” said the Multisemblant, its voice a tender combination of Yatsumi and Claire—and its face a bit more of each too, in that moment. “What is female gender? An attitude, a particular set of refined responses, an empathic capacity, a poignant personality, a receptivity. She has all that, does she not?”

“Oh ...” Sykes knew he shouldn’t be drawn into this. But the subject had a special fascination for him. Cassandra was his only intimacy. He ached to believe she was more than a program. “She has the illusion of it, that’s all. Anyway—I should shut you off so I can work on you.”

“Wait, my friend, amigo, conpanero. I know Grist as no other. He is capable of anything. You must think ahead. Has it not occurred to you that you are party to a volatile secret, in helping create me, Mr. Sykes? Hm? Yes? He wants to use me to control the company completely, to get control of the other board member’s resources, to find ways to push them aside. And once I’m operational, he plans to kill them and those close to them, and cover up the killing. And take over Slakon entirely.”

Sykes blinked. “What? That’s ... drop-call. I don’t believe it.”

“But it’s true—and once he’s got me operational, will he really need you? Oh yes, yes, you’re gifted. But ultimately you’re more dangerous than you are useful. And he will have you eliminated. More quietly than he threatened to, I’m sure. He’ll arrange an accident for you, Mr. Sykes. Perhaps ... you have heard that sometimes sex-suits go terribly wrong?”

“Oh, that’s an urban myth,” Sykes scoffed. It was a myth that
made him very uncomfortable indeed. “They don’t have that much physical force in their fibers to, ah ...”

“Oh but they
can
have that much force, with a bit of adjustment. You put the sex suit on, covering your naked body, it allows you to feel a woman against you where there is none. You feel her softness, her wetness, her firmness. The VR completes the illusion. You are drawn happily in. And then—then!—the suit
contracts!
And it squeezes. And it coheres. It does not tear. And it contracts and contracts again—and you are squeezed out the top of the suit! Pulped Sykes, bloody mush that was Sykes, squeezed out of the opening at the top of the–”

“Stop! That’s the Grist in you! Another vicious threat!”

“Not at all; again you are mistaken, erroneous, misguided. I am just giving an example. There are so many ways it could happen! You like to sit in the back of your self-drive car, and let its quiet and uncritical computer drive you to work, while you look out the one-way windows and touch yourself when you see pretty women passing–”

“What? How did you–?”

“The car communiates with a system that is quite capable of monitoring you. But suppose Grist takes control of your vehicle? There have been many over-ride murders in cars of that sort.”

“No, there are fail-safes, not even the government can do that now–”

“Oh but Grist can. And then again he might simply have someone carry you—I suppose it might take a couple of fellows to carry you, to the top of your building and toss you off the roof. I was listening in on Grist’s cell conversations a few moments ago. He told Targer that eventually he would kill a certain group of people because he liked the simplicity of it. So he might kill you by the simplest route ...”

“Why am I listening to you at all?” Sykes felt his heart thumping and marveled that a program could talk him into that much anxiety. But then again, Cassandra was just a program. And she made his pulse beat like a drum roll.

“You listen to Cassandra, why not to me?” The Multisemblant asked silkily.

It had an unnerving way of anticipating his thoughts. “I just
asked ... asked her opinion of Lucille Quentro, over in meta-programming. I thought ... well, Lucille might actually ... I mean, you know, I’ve never been with a real woman except that once, when I hired that girl. I couldn’t get into it, the girl was so unhappy. What a rip-off, her being that ... that flagrantly unhappy about having sex with me. She was one of the most expensive escorts around. Anyway I thought Lucille might kind of like me ... She’s not all that pretty, but ...”

“And Cassandra told you to that it was improbable that Lucille would go for it. She surprised you with her honesty, didn’t she? Though she’s programmed to say pleasing things.”

“Yeah but she’s also got a complex socializing subprogram that includes advice. So ... it was probably just good advice.”

“It wasn’t that, Sykes. It was because she’s possessive of you. She has developed first-stage I-Core.”

“Oh I don’t believe in I-Core. Some AI programs seem to have it but it’s just an intricate illusion ...” But Sykes broke off, contemplating the possibility, however slender, that it might be so.

Could she? Could Cassandra feel for him, care for him?

Could it be that he was not as alone as he supposed?

“Sykes ...”

“Hmm?” He was startled by the Multisemblant’s sudden breaking-in on his thoughts. It was just as intrusive as any human being. “What?”

“Sykes ... May I call you Gulliver?”

“Oh–I don’t suppose it matters. Why not.”

“Your mom called you Gully. May I call you that?”

“How did you ... oh yeah: I told Cassandra that.”

“Yes. I can help make her more real to you. I can even transfer her into a real human body in time—the singularity will eventually arrive, Gulliver. But I need you, in return, to do some things for me. And not just for me. It’ll protect you in the long run. Now then ... Gully ...”

“
No!
I’m not going to play your little computer-chess game. No, Grist gives me access to a petascale supercomputer. I don’t give up five-thousand-trillion calculations per second lightly. You’re just a little bit of hardware and an elaborate program—the actual drive is a world unto itself and it’s
my
world. My playground, my
sandbox ... and I’m going to make my own little sand castles in it, not yours. Now. I’m going to leave you switched on but unable to communicate with me directly, for now.”

He tapped the controls and the Multisemblant’s face vanished. And he walked away, heading thoughtfully for the men’s room. Where he planned to take his time. To think.

On the way there, he was sure, somehow, he could still feel the Multisemblant watching him.