Black Glass (2 page)

W
hen the screen beeped for a ReMinding, “Pup” Benson was thinking about Cabo San Lucas. Of course, Cabo wasn’t much to see nowadays, being mostly underwater, along with a lot of the Mexican coast, but there was a high time to be had in the old days—about the time of Pup’s first spring break, what, twenty-three or twenty-four years ago, long before he dreamed he’d end up a guard in an UnMinded Cellblock; back when a college student in Cabo could slide down, over and over, from a hot pinnacle of self gratification: Margueritas over-the-counter Mexican Dexedrine, endless golden spillways of San Miguel
cerveza
, dancing, beach games—and a living search engine for willing women. Long as your parents’ credit card held out you were a god.

The girl in Cabo he remembered most vividly (though he’d forgotten her name) was that crazy Japanese-American piece who giggled when he banged her and was ready just about any time at all. “What’s that?” she’d asked playfully, with a pretense of wide eyes, every time he flipped out his business end. “That’s my little puppy,” he’d say. She’d giggle and she’d pet his puppy and he wondered whatever had happened to that girl–

“BENSON GET IT IN FUCKING GEAR–”

Pup practically shot out of his orange plastic staff-lounge seat, because Stremp, with his black D.I.’s voice, had bounced
the shout off the back of his head. “FUCK, Stremp, you are not in the motherfuckin’ ComSee anymore–” Stremp, a tall chubby bald black man, had been a trainer for the Community Service Militia. Had been a big hard man and now this job dealing with the UnMinded left Stremp a big soft man.

“We’ve got two ReMinds and one UnMind to do,” Stremp snapped, barely dialing back his bellow, “and I don’t have any time for your whining bullshit. Let’s go.”

Pup ran a hand through his thinning hair, shrugged, and went to the head like he had to piss, just to make the son of a bitch wait. He hated Wednesdays. He hated every workday. He worked whatever shifts the privatized prison system told him to. Weekends had become nearly extinct when unions had.

In the bathroom, Pup looked in the mirror, tweaked some pimples on his nose; doc said he was getting broken veins on it from drinking. You worked in this place, you had to drink sometimes.

“BENSON–!”

Fuck.
Pup wanted a drink.

Pup thumbed the greasy tab on the cell lock; the panel in the door became transparent and a stream of light automatically spot-lit the con lying on the padded shelf that passed for an UnMinded’s bed.

Richard Candle.

Pup looked at the UnMinded prisoner on the shelf bed, then at the digital image on the remote switcher. Two views of the guy, along with his numbers. Face and numbers matched.

“Yeah, that’s him.”

He closed the panel, tapped the code. Got it wrong the first time; the door panel blinked red. “Shit.” Tried again. Door slid open. Prisoner 788843, in prison blues and slippers, was lying on his back, the way they all did—because that was how regs wanted them—like a dead guy with his hands over his chest, eyes shut, couldn’t even see him breathe.

UnMinded he was, but anyone could still see Candle’s personality in the lines of his face. A lean, squarish face with deep-set
eyes, hard lines to his jaw, a slightly perverse crookedness to his lips; the early-middle-aged face that said:
I’d like to stay on the right side of you so don’t fuck with me.
A face that had held an expression of friendly warning for long periods of time.

Pup tapped his wrist remote. In response, Candle opened his eyes. Looking up at the ceiling. No expression in those smoky gray-blue eyes.

“Get out of there, Candle 788843,” Stremp said.

Instantly, Candle swung off the table. He stood, looked at them expectantly. No particular expression; no particular lack of expression. Not zombie-like, but not present either.

“Stremp—we ReMind him now?”

“Nah-uh. He’s supposed to have a couple hours work detail to get the blood flowing, and anyway we’ve got a backlog.”

“Okayyyyy—Candle, 788843: let’s go, out to your right, follow the yellow line to work detail.”

Responding to the combination of name and number, Candle went. His expression never changed.

The message scrolling on the ceiling read:
They backon letting prispissin toletday Caning putre back out bodof mindle.

Terrence Grist reached past Lisha and hit the decrypter. Now the text message read:

They’re putting Candle’s mind back in his body. They’re letting him out of prison. Today.

Grist lay on his back, re-reading the message looping across the ceiling screen; Lisha kept on working, straddling him, keeping his dwindling maleness locked inside the intersection of her womanhood, gazing down at him with a practiced simulation of reverence. She was used to Grist reading and phoning during sex.

He read the message again and, wanting to keep his erection, he continued moving his hips, trying not to break rhythm ...

Candle.

You want to keep it up, don’t think about Rick Candle.

He’d penciled this bedding into a busy schedule and he didn’t want to waste it. Lisha was expensive—everything about her. Even her face, which he’d paid for: Grist was in bed with himself.

Lisha had been surgically altered to have his face—stylized female, girlish pretty, sure, but it was Grist’s face, nano-surgically reproduced. Not too much of a stretch: he’d always had “pretty boy” features, slender, almost fawnlike; not a transexual face but it could have been the gender-bending visage of a rock star from the last century. Lisha’s variant of his face wasn’t virtual, no; virtual was cheap bullshit. Lisha was flesh and blood, face-formed and paid for. She was a high-priced contract wife—very pricey indeed, her agent had been damned good. She’d pretended to like her new face from the moment the form-case was removed, using the acting skills that had been part of her training at the agency. She knew she could get it switched back, or altered to another face, fairly easily.

“Narcissism got a bad rap,”
he had said to her, as they looked at her new face in a mirror, a year ago.
“The ego really is all there is of a man, or a woman. There is no soul; there is nothing but the ego, and memories. The
me-trix,
we call it, my dear, in the semblant trade. And if you want to be my wife enough, my pampered wife, be my sweet, feminized mirror reflection and be happy.”

Today, in his bedroom, four digicams multiplied him on the surround-screens. Vapors of mild, designer-stimulant enhanced the high-oxy house environment, disposing him to stonily muse: Here he was complete, two identities dovetailed into one, and what an expression dovetailed was, considered just now, the tail of a dove, the white bird who ...

What about Candle? If that pit-bull of an ex-cop ...

His attachment to the moment’s pleasures melted away. He felt he was falling away from Lisha, falling right through the bed into a cold aloneness.

A side effect of the vapors, he told himself.
You’re not alone. You’re surrounded by those who work for you.

Candle ... Maeterling ...

What was left of his erection ... went.

“What’s uh matter?” Lisha said muzzily, smothering a yawn.

“I just ... I remembered something, an emergency. Business. . . emergency. Off ... please.”

Lisha dutifully rolled off, casually and professionally, like a friendly restaurant worker clearing a table.

Grist sat up, reached for the cut-class bottle next to the bed, decanted brandy into a crystal balloon, drank off half of it and felt a little calmer. He went into the next room, closed the door, stood over the smart table, activated it, whipped his fingers over the selector window for Targer; left the most basic message possible.
“Targer? See who you can pay off. Keep Candle inside. Do what you have to. Or arrange an accident with his ... machinery. I don’t care who his friends used to be.”

Get your mind off Candle ...

But Candle had found out about Grist taking advantage of the skim-scam that Maeterling had cooked up. He’d found out after he’d taken the rap for his brother, right before the UnMinding. Too late. No more cop empowerment. No access to those accounts. But Candle had found out from Maeterling. Former Grist employee. The little weasel had tried to make a deal with Candle ... too late.
“I’m pretty sure Mr. Grist waited before informing the cops of my skim and used it himself. If you can get proof we can blackmail him ...”

Grist had gotten rid of Maeterling. And Candle had to take the UnMinding to cover his brother. No time to do anything else. Should have had Candle taken care of while he was UnMinded—but Candle had friends in law enforcement who put out the word: Any accident befalls Candle in prison, they’d investigate.

And now Candle was getting out.

Feeling cold, though the rooms were exquisitely temperature-controlled, Grist returned to Lisha.

He sat on the bed, tapped the smart table next to the bed, replayed his v-mail as Lisha lay back on the pillows, her whole body a shrug, and rolled to face her own console, tuned it to iVogue.

He thought: She’s losing her ability to pretend she cares when I stop making love to her. There was a tell-tale smell in the room, lingering on his genitals—a chemical smell he was tempted to complain about. It was her pre-applied vaginal lubricant. She’d put it in right before their session, obviously. It was perfumed but you could smell the lubricant chemicals underneath. Which meant that she couldn’t get excited enough to lubricate naturally. With him, anyway. He toyed with the idea of hiring someone to excite her, some body builder perhaps. But it was insulting, his
having to do that. No: She was going to make an effort. He’d talk to her later. He reached for the towel dispenser, wiped the lubricant off with one hand, his other hand scrolling through messages.

There was v-mail from Mitwell—a cherubic exec wearing a formal blue-silk choker, his unaltered, plebian face an irritant to Grist.

Really, Grist felt, this whole business of resisting facial improvements, with nanosurgery so handy for the moneyed, was an obnoxious fad. “Naturalism.” Having to look at faces so natively unattractive was like having to gaze on a man’s scrotum. But Mitwell was “a natural.” Hypocritically, though, he often used a semblant. They all did.

“When you’re ready, sir,” Mitwell (or his semblant?) was saying. “Just hit ‘two’ for the semblant spot—this one’s for executives’ clubs.”

Grist tapped the console’s control and Mitwell’s image was replaced by a lovely blond spokesperson, her hair artfully tousled, her tone intimate.
“I understand. I do. You’re busy. That’s the point. You’ve heard about semblants—only you haven’t, not really. You only think you have. Seventy percent semblance wasn’t enough for Slakon. The new Slakon semblants copy ... you. Your image, your presentation, your personality ... completely.”

At Grist’s urging, Slakon had trademarked the word “semblant” two years before. The word “simulation” came off as something fake and even cheap. And they didn’t want cheap—semblants should be about
glamour.
Success. Money. The term “semblant” was rapidly replacing the older words like “mindclone” and “cyberclone” and all the other distastefully antiquated “clone” derivatives. There was nothing biological about a semblant, after all.

As Grist watched, the new spot cut to an image of a young male exec looking critically at variants of his own semblant. They looked fuzzy
. “Everything you are—”
The images then came sharply into focus. The exec looked into the camera and put his finger over his smiling lips: Shhhh!
“—you edit for privacy at your discretion.”
Two of the semblant images put their fingers over their mouths, with slightly different expressions; the third one simply winked.

“And now Slakon can ‘semblant’ your mind for up to fifteen meetings at once!”