Slant

by Greg Bear

  Instinctively, Martin does not like this man—he feels uncomfortable in his presence. But many strong-willed patients in deep pain come across this way.

  Crest slaps his hand on the chair arm. “I am haunted, Dr. Burke. There are days when I know I’m going to crumble. Some of the corporations I work with, making very large deals—they require an inspection every month, can you believe it?”

  Martin smiles. “It’s not called for, that’s for sure.”

  “It’s a way of weeding out failure. High naturals have a lower chance of letting a deal fall through. A brain race.” Crest smiles back at Martin. The smile seems to fall in shadow, though the room is brightly lit. “Very American. Reliability above creativity.”

  “Intelligence and creativity often accompany more fragile constitutions,” Martin says. The lecture is familiar, meant to reassure. “There’s every evidence some people are more sensitive and alert, more attuned to reality, and this puts a greater load on their systems. Still, these people make themselves very useful in our society. We couldn’t get along without them—”

  Crest shakes his head vigorously. “Genius is next to madness, is that what you’re saying, Doctor?”

  “Genius is a particular state of mind… a type of mind, only distantly comparable to the types I’m talking about.”

  “Like a genie in the head? Just rub it the right way and out it comes? Well, I’m no genius,” Crest chuckles tensely, “and I haven’t been accused of being very sensitive… So why do I worry? I mean, the type of decisions I’m called upon to make demand tough thinking, maybe even a lack of human sensitivity… And above all else, stability. I have to stand up to tough conditions for long periods of time.”

  “Well, your name is well known, Mr. Crest.”

  Crest raises a finger and jabs at the ceiling. “One little slip… Down from high natural to, say, a simple untherapied.” Crest shudders. “One little inappropriate thought, and my wife takes her connections with her—right out of the house. I honestly think I’m going to obsess myself into just what I fear, over this.

  “Dr. Burke, this conversation has to be absolutely secure. Confidential. I am willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars for you to secretly take care of me if I should fall.”

  Martin hates turning down patients; he also hates being treated like a man who can be bought. Not that he’s unassailable—to his intense personal shame, he’s been bought before. It’s a theme in his life. He knows what the consequences can be.

  Crest sighs. “This is torture for you, isn’t it, Doctor?”

  “How?”

  “Having a high natural come in here and run off about chances of failing. I mean, you’re not a high natural, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Untherapied? Just a natural?”

  “No.”

  “Therapied, and for sometime, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So you must be… I mean, it must be like having a rich man come in and worry about losing his money, and you haven’t got any.”

  Martin squints at Crest and says, “You’re offering four times my highest rate. It’s a generous offer, but I would be less than honest if I didn’t tell you that there’s too much emphasis on high natural ratings. It isn’t that big a deal. It’s another human measurement, a quantification some folks are willing to use to separate us from each other.”

  “I’m not a have-not, Dr. Burke. I’m used to having.”

  “I wouldn’t put so much store in having this particular thing, this high natural rating, if I were you. You’d be surprised at the power and influence of some who don’t.”

  “Sure,” Crest says, agitated. “Like you. Nobody rates you but your medical board. Doctors have always protected their own.”

  Martin clamps his teeth together tightly before answering. “If we used the criteria your fellow businessmen seem to find attractive, we’d lose most of our best, our most sensitive doctors.”

  “There’s that word again,” Crest says, sniffing and drawing in his jaw. “Sensitive. I’m not an artist, I’m not a therapist, I’m a decision maker. Have to make a dozen important decisions a day, every day. I have to be keen, like a knife edge. Not sensitive.”

  “The sharper the edge, the more liable it is to be blunted if it’s misused,” Martin observes.

  “I have my standards,” Crest says. “I’m sorry if nobody else is strong enough to accept them.”

  “Mr. Crest, I have my standards as well. If this is going to have any positive outcome, we should start all over again. You’ve interrupted my day without an appointment, you’ve impugned my professional ethics by flinging money at me…”

  Crest sits very still. The light around his face is not natural, not the lighting of the room. He might be made of wax.

  “I know you don’t like me, and that’s fine, I’m used to that, but I have my own sense of honor, Dr. Burke. I’ve gotten myself into something. I know what’s right and what isn’t and I’ve violated that code. It began as greed. Greed for life, I suppose, for fighting off the real devils, for keeping all I’ve made. But it’s beyond that now.” Crest stares at him.

  Martin cannot penetrate the vagueness of the man’s face. He has never seen anything like it. If you can come back later today, I can run my own evaluation, with my own equipment.”

  “Now,” Crest says. “I need it now.”

  Martin is willing to believe that Crest is close to a thymic imbalance, maybe even a pathic collapse, but the situation is fraught with legal difficulties.

  “I can’t treat you on an emergency basis, Mr. Crest.”

  “These men and women I’m involved with… they kill people who talk to outsiders.”

  That does it, Martin thinks. “I can recommend a clinic not two blocks from here, but sir, with your resources, you can—”

  “I can’t use my own medical or therapists. They’re not secure. I agreed to have them feed my stats and vitals into… the center. They would know. I’m close to the edge, Doctor. Two hundred thousand.”

  Martin swallows. “I can’t treat patients close to severe collapse. That requires an initial evaluation by a federally licensed primary therapist.”

  Crest smiles again, or perhaps he is not smiling at all.

  He leans forward and places his arms on Martin’s desk. “I could tell you, and then tell them. They would have to kill you. Or discredit you.”

  “I don’t react well to threats,” Martin says. “I can’t be forced to do something illegal, whatever the money or the threats. I think you should—”

  “I could kill you myself.”

  Martin stands. “Get out.”

  “I could be just like them, but I’m not. I really am not.” He raises his arms and shouts, “No agreements, no pressure. I’d give it all up. Doctor, you can have it all… Just get me out of this!”

  “I’ve told you what my limits are, Mr. Crest. I can give you the names of very discreet emergency therapists—”

  Crest stands and brushes off his elbows, though the chair arms are not dusty. His voice is steady now. “I’m sorry to have wasted your time. I’ll feed fifty K into your accounts for your trouble.”

  “No need,” Martin says, knowing that his anger is completely inappropriate, but feeling very angry.

  Martin escorts Crest to the door. Crest pauses, turns as if, to say something more, and then leaves.

  Martin sighs deeply, collects himself. He walks into the lobby a few minutes later. Arnold and Kim stare at him, sharing his relief and astonishment. They go to the window looking down on the street and see a small black limousine move into traffic three floors below.

  “That is the strangest encounter I’ve had in years,” Martin says. He glances at Kim. “Evaluation?”

  “He’s real close,” Kim says. “He should go to a primary therapist.”

  “That’s what I told him. He wouldn’t listen.”

  “Then there’s nothing we can do.”

  Nevertheless, Martin f
eels a jab of guilt. He has not even re-applied for a federal license. He is sure he would be turned down—and that could be a black mark against his current practice.

  Like Crest, he, too, has a tortuous path to follow.

  “Doctor,” Arnold says. “Ms. Carrilund got your touch and needs to respond right away. I wouldn’t interrupt before the next client, but—”

  He thinks of Crest’s situation, and how prevalent in the real world that kind of cruel competition must be, to drag down even the wealthiest. “I’ll take it,” Martin says.

  He returns to his office and faces the pad on the desk. Carrilund appears before him in complete detail, mid-fifties, white-blonde, in a stylishly tailored commons suit with ruffle sleeves. She is handsome and aging naturally, and Martin concludes she must have been dangerously beautiful in her youth. In some respects she reminds him of Carol—but many women remind him of Carol now.

  “I’m glad you have time to talk, Dr. Burke,” Carrilund begins. “Your work has been highly recommended by a number of our clients.”

  “I’m pleased to hear that,” Martin says. His mouth is still sour. He pours himself a glass of water from the carafe on his desk and takes a sip.

  “Have you noticed an increase in fallbacks in your practice?” Carrilund asks.

  No. Most of my practice is with core therapy rejects.”

  “I see. All of our clients with you now are CTRs, are they not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dr. Burke, my sources tell me you’re likely to receive a flood of fallback and CTR clients in the next few months.”

  “From your agency?” Martin asks.

  “Perhaps, but not necessarily through this office. We’ve had CTR notices on over half our clients going into primary therapy. That’s not something I would like blown to the fibes, Dr. Burke, but it’s not going to be a secret for long.”

  Martin whistles. “Extraordinary,” he says.

  “We’ve never seen rates higher than five percent in all the years I’ve been with Workers Inc. I was wondering if you’d be interested in participating in a little study.”

  “I don’t see why not—if this is a real, long-term problem. But as I said, in my practice, I would not notice such a trend until…” What she has said suddenly hits him. He feels a little queasy.

  “There are only five doctors in your line of work in the Corridor,” Carrilund says. “I think you’re going to see a big increase in your business.”

  If her statistics were not just flukes, that would mean… He quickly calculates. Tens of thousands for each of the five. “I can’t handle that kind of load.”

  Carrilund smiles sympathetically. “It could be a big problem for us all. We’d like to work with you to learn the root causes… If there are any. We’re looking at entry-level workers, most of them in their late teens and early twenties, going through their first qualification inspections. It’s heartbreaking for them, Doctor. It could be a challenge to our whole economy.”

  “I understand that. Please count me in, and keep me informed.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Burke. I will.”

  “And make an arrangement with my office for a personal meeting.”

  “Thank you.” They exchange home sigs. Carrilund smiles sedately and Martin transfers her to Arnold.

  Martin sits lost in thought. He came very close to being CTR himself, years ago; too close to having to face, day after day, for years on end, the prospect of an inner voice that murmurs of confusion and pain and much, much worse.

  He has raised his hands, unconsciously, as if to ward off something coming toward him. With another shudder, he drops them to his lap, composes himself, and tells Arnold to send in Mrs. Avril De Johns.

  Access to knowledge and information is necessary to a dataflow economy. But it will cost you…

  Every single access will cost you. A penny here, a thousand dollars there, a million a year over there somewhere… subscriptions and encryptions and decryptions. If you haven’t already shown yourself to be a part of the flow—if you aren’t a student given research dispensation, or already earning your way by turning information into knowledge and that into money and work—the action anatomy of society—it’s a tough old world.

  Perhaps in discouragement you become one of the disAffected and spend all your federal dole on the more flagrant Yox, drowning yourself in enervating lies. You’re allowed, but you’re out of the loop. One-way flow is not a game; it’s a sucking little death.

  —The U.S. Government Digiman on Dataflow Economics,

  56th Revision, 2052

  Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now. Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with all your brains, would soon be useless in a mouse’s universe…

  —Lloyd Ricardo, Pressed Between Two Flat Seconds:

  Preserving the Human Flower

  It’s not your grandmother’s world. It was never your grandmother’s world.

  Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie

  4

  THINKER, FEELER

  Nathan Rashid gives his fiancée, Ayesha Kale, a tour of Mind Design’s most famous inhabitant, Jill

  Nathan is Jill’s new chief engineer and friend. He replaced Roger Atkins two years ago, when Atkins became chief administrator for Mind Design’s new thinker development.

  Nathan headed the team that brought her back from her collapse, and Jill regards him with warm affection. She does not believe he will do anything to reduce her functions or alter her present state. After all, it was Nathan who devised the ornate Loop Detail Interrupt that restored her to awareness and full function.

  Jill trusts him, but she has not told him about the mystery.

  Nathan and Ayesha stand in a broad cream-colored room with a central riser surrounded by transparent glass plates. On the riser sits a snow-white cube about one meter on a side, attended by three smaller cubes. Nathan is thirty-five, dark-haired, broad-faced, with an immediate, eager, and sometimes mischievous smile. Ayesha is five years older, brown-haired, with large, all-absorbing black eyes and a mouth that seems ready to acknowledge disappointment.

  The cubes are connected by fibes as well as by direct optical links, which twinkle like blue eyes as they pass through the empty air between.

  “Is that her?” Ayesha asks.

  “That’s her,” Nathan says.

  “That’s all?”

  Jill sits in warm and cold, feeling neither. Her emotions, as with all of us, do not seem to come from her particular structures, though she is much more aware of her internal processes.

  “Most of her is here. Why, disappointed?”

  Jill’s body, if she can be said to have one, is mainly in Del Mar and Palo Alto, California. There are many parts of her less than a few cubic centimeters in size spread through eleven different buildings along Southcoast. She is connected to these extensions through a variety of I/Os by fibes and satlinks and even a few tentative quantum gated links (which she finds annoying; they do not work all the time, and may in fact slow her thinking if relied upon exclusively).

  “She’s so small!” Ayesha says.

  Nathan smiles. “She was twice as big before the refit.”

  “Still, so small, to be so famous.”

  Jill is listening, Nathan knows. She listens attentively to all of her inputs, but he does not know that a significant portion of her is in unlinked isolation, devoted much of the time to considering mystery. She has pondered this mystery for several years, ever since her shutdown and redesign.

  She does not clearly remember events after her Feedback Fine Detail Collapse. But she remembers some things she should not be able to remember, and this is what intrigues her.

  “Why is she a she?” Ayesha asks.

  “She decided on her own. Roger Atkins may have started it when he named her after a girlfriend. Besides, she’s a mother. We seed other thinkers from her.”

  Jill is the most adva
nced thinker ever made, the first—on Earth—to become self-aware. She has a sibling in deep space, far from Earth, who achieved self-awareness before she did, but its status is currently unknown. Her creators assume that it, too, suffered Feedback Fine Detail Collapse, and that all of its functions locked up, so that it now drifts around another star, alone and probably in a state equivalent to death.

  Generations from now, when other, more complex ships head for the stars, perhaps they will find and resurrect her sibling. Jill hopes she will be around for a reunion.

  She silently follows Nathan and Ayesha with her glass-almond eyes, mounted on thin rods protruding from the walls around the room. Ayesha walks around her like a zoo visitor examining an interesting animal in a cage.

  “She’s the most powerful mind on the planet,” Nathan says proudly. “Unless you believe Torino.”

  “What does Torino say?”

  “He thinks there’s a world-spanning bacterial mind,” Nathan says lightly.

  “A mind, in germs?” Ayesha says, drawing her head back incredulously. “Really?”

  “Not like a human mind, or even like Jill, not socially self-aware. He thinks every bacterium is a node in a loosely connected network. That would make them parts of the largest distributed network anywhere—on Earth, at least.”

  “Yeah, well, Jill can talk,” Ayesha says. “And bacteria can’t.”

  Jill remembers some aspects of the FFDC collapse. She can even model some of its features. But after the collapse, her self-awareness ceased to exist. Or rather, it became so finely detailed, she modeled her selves so continuously and with such high resolution, that she reached her theoretical limits.

  And for a time, ceased to be.

  But in that time…

  She has not told her creators about aspects of that mostly blank time. That not everything was blank puzzles her.

  “She doesn’t even have a boyfriend, and already she’s a mother!” Ayesha says wryly. “Better make her a boyfriend soon, or she’s going to start cruising.”