Slant

by Greg Bear

  “Twelve hours and seventeen minutes,” Jill answers.

  “We’ve checked every registered thinker—and double-checked all the companies 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 portion. I have analyzed the beginning sections already. The holographic portion may not yet be complete, and so of course it can’t be deciphered.”

  “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. Erwin 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. “We’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 you—”

  “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.”

  “Um,” 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 no more.

  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 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.

  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 come 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 fibes and shots… And a lot of them were real hotshots at promotion. They had lived and breathed the fibes 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 21st 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.

  Bringing sex entertainment much-needed talent and style, the grimy adolescent gluttony of early porn, crude and ill-mannered, was covered with a new coat of paint and pushed into public acceptance by studio after studio. Most of the product went direct through fibes and seats into the private home.

  And back up the link flew hundreds of billions of dollars.

  Some say the sex industry, with its newfound acceptance, led the way for the Federalist Surge and the elitist Raphkind presidency, and all of its political horrors; it forced the moralist hand, which turned out to be corrupt, extreme, and ultimately dripping with gore. The failure of the conservative moralists to exhibit truly moral leadership created an anything-goes backlash…

  Every decade has brought new technologies and expanded audiences, and the same old same old, tarted up and occasionally even profundified, given artistic legitimacy—that ancient much-masticated blue movie has rolled on, and on, lubricating the pipes of the great flow.

  —The Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie

  10

  The advocate for the estate of Terence Crest sits beside Mary in the old, dignified brown and cream office of Seattle Oversight on the ground floor of Columbia Tower.

  The Crest advocate, Selena Parmenter, is in her early thirties if appearances can be trusted, and she acts bored. She has said little to Mary as they wait for the deputy district director of Seattle Oversight, the honorable Clarens Lodge, to take his seat and listen to their appeals.

  Oversight was created in the teens. The first states to use the procedure were California and Washington. With so much information on citizens recorded daily by vid, home monitors, fibe and satlink uploads, and neighborhood surveillance systems, a separate branch of the judiciary was established to hear appeals from those seeking to use that information for legal purposes.

  Early abuses—and the far worse systematic abuse under the Raphkind presidency—has made the system painfully complex for all concerned. Each avenue of information has been wrapped in labyrinthine rules of legal engagement; and an appeal for release of data can be made only once a year for any given case.

  The deputy district director enters and takes his seat behind the broad steel desk. Clarens Lodge is a small, boyish male in his late twenties, with thick black hair and a pixie expression that he tries with some success to make serious.

  “PD Fourth Mary Choy, and Selena Parmenter, advocate for the estate of Terence Crest, recently deceased and with judgment of suicide as cause of death… All right, I’ve gone through the voir, let’s hear the dire. Miz Parmenter?”

  “Seattle PD has requested the private and protected apartment vid records of my client without compelling cause. Under Citizen Oversight Code twenty-seven c in Public Data Access, Washington State, Book Nine, amended Federal twenty-two c Book Nine, Public Defense must have clear evidence that a crime has been committed to even solicit private vid records. No crime has been committed; Mr. Crest has been presumed by our assigned medicals and by the state to have killed himself. Suicide has not been a crime in this state for thirty-seven years.”

  This appears to amuse Lodge. He tightens a beginning smile, completely out of place it seems to Mary, into a not very stem frown. “Miz Choy?”

  “Seattle PD forensic medical have stated that while the cause and time of death can be established with certainty, we have no way of knowing whether the death is suicide or homicide or even accidental. We believe that state judgment may be premature, and we are still investigating to establish motives and opportunities. We need to learn the circumstances and mental attitude of Mr. Crest in the hours before his death. We’re also investigating the possible role of a visitor to Mr. Crest’s home just prior to his death.”

  “You were investigating Mr. Crest on another matter before his death,” Parmenter says. “Is that matter still pending?”

  “It has been given a temporary open status until we can assemble a complete picture of Mr. Crest’s situation.”

  “Temporary open status is hardly urgent,” Parmenter says. “As you know, sir, temporary open implies all smoke and no fire, no real case at all.”

  The deputy director nods studiously. “Miz Choy, why should Oversight give Seattle PD access to the private records of a man who is not likely to be charged with any crime, since he is now dead, and the case is weak to begin with?”

  Mary has been through Oversight hearings dozens of time in her career; she has never enjoyed them. Oversight, it seems to her, has become a kind of fiefdom for the least competent of an already pompous judiciary. She has never yet met a director or deputy director who impressed her. This director, she thinks, is perhaps the least impressive of all.

  “The presence of a Miz Alice Grale needs to be explained, sir.”

  “Yes, there’s a story going around in the fibes that she’s involved,” the deputy director muses. “But it should be her advocate seeking records to clear her name, and as far as I know, we have no such request.” He looks to Parmenter. “What do you know about this woman’s involvement? Apparently she was employed by Mr. Crest as a sex care provider…” He smiles openly at this polite phrasing and refers to his pad. “Agented by Wellspring Temps, specializing in entertainment… And you, Miz Parmenter, have frozen payments to her agency. Why?”

  “We have no evidence she provided essential services as per her contract.”

  Lodge grimaces. “Shaky, Miz Parmenter. My records indicate Mr. Crest put his seal on the disbursal before he died. It was a legitimate transaction, and I suspect Wellspring, should they decide to press the matter, will receive their money, as will Miz Grale.”

  Parmenter says nothing to this.

  Lodge frowns, and this time with more conviction. “Do you believe that Miz Grale had some role in his death, perhaps in changing his mood, exacerbating the circumstances in what must have been a tense evening for him? Is that your reason to deny her just payment for services?”

  “The estate does not believe that the quasi-legal business of prostitution—”

  “Sex care, please,” Lodge insists, with a wry grin “Last I dipped into the state code, it’s fully legal and even licensed in most counties. Something to do with Business and Occupation taxes forty years ago. But you’re too young to remember.”

  Mary is prepared to change her opinion about this deputy district director.

  Parmenter is not amused. “We must protect the interests of the estate’s heirs, and Mrs. Crest did not file any authorization for her husband to spend substantial joint funds pending final settlement of their divorce—not that I represent the former Mrs. Crest—but
this is all beside the main point, sir.”

  “Yes, yes, but the apartment vid will surely settle these issues, and may in fact be requested by Wellspring in their case, should they decide to pursue it—and for seventy-five thousand dollars, I certainly would. An extraordinary amount of money for the services of a mere prostitute, don’t you think?”

  “The going rate is about five thousand for an evening,” Mary says.

  Lodge turns on her with a look of mock affront. “Please,” he says. “My sensibilities are at least as delicate as those of Miz Parmenter.”

  “We do find the circumstances irregular,” Parmenter says reluctantly. “Irregular enough to contest payment, and I do not like to say more without conferring with the estate.”

  “Do you have a description of the vid?” Lodge asks.

  Parmenter appears distinctly uncomfortable. “Advocates are prevented from releasing details about personal evidence in dispute,” she says, “until Oversight rules to release it for legal purposes. You know that, sir.”

  “Miz Parmenter, I assume Mr. Crest kept a vid record of all his personal affairs, as so many important people do, though with many different motives, and I can’t presume to guess what Mr. Crest’s motives were. But such systems, in my experience, keep at least a minimal visual-to-text log, transcribed by an automated secretary. You have of course looked at this log?”

  “Yes, sir. It is vague as to details.”

  “But what does it say, broadly?”

  “It indicates the presence of two individuals in the apartment until Mr. Crest’s death. The time elements are vague, because with the alerting of medicals—”

  “We alerted the medical in Crest’s building,” Mary says. “The log must show the presence of SPD officers at that point.”

  “Appearing for an appointment with Mr. Crest to discuss this other case, now temporarily kept open,” Lodge says. “A man has sex with a woman, whom he pays an inordinate amount of money, and then commits suicide. He’s involved with shady investments… With companies or individuals who have negligently allowed young women to die in a horrible manner. He’s a very complex man, this Terence Crest.”