by Greg Bear
“My God,” Martin murmurs. “If your members are arrested, do you track news reports?”
“Of course,” Carrilund says. “All that information has to be included in their employment prospectuses, by federal law.” She makes a sour face. “We hate to do it, but the Raphkind amendments to our charter force us to.”
“Can you show me vids on the more serious cases? I’d like to see facial expressions, body language.”
“I think I can bring that in. Let me ask the INDA.”
It takes ten seconds, but the display returns with a simple text list of news reports on file for the past three days. The list scrolls before them. Martin picks out two. The first is a flat vid of a well-dressed male, age thirty to thirty-five, standing on a street corner. He is shouting at passersby, singling out the few transforms for intense verbal abuse. The incident has been captured by a small flying news sniffer. It slowly circles the man.
Martin notes the cocky angle of the man’s head, his small, steady, confident smile. He seems to think what he is doing is not only enjoyable, but beneficial. He appears surprised and offended when a large black male accompanying a small, delicate transform female threatens him with a raised fist and starts shouting him down.
“This client received therapy for a minor thymic imbalance when he was twenty-two, thirteen years ago,” Carrilund says. “Depressive tendencies and eating disorders.”
“He’s beyond that now,” Martin observes. “Second-vid.”
This vid, also from a sniffer, shows a small, middle-aged woman—about his age, Martin guesses—in a public plaza inside one of the larger towers. She is pulling up her dress and masturbating. Her delighted expression is that of a little girl revealing some lovely surprise to her friends. Two female mall security guards take her by the arms and the vid ends.
“Therapied ten years ago for fear of public places,” Carrilund explains. Martin sighs.
The list returns and Martin clears the display. He leans toward Carrilund.
“The fusing of public misbehavior, shouting obscenities, uncharacteristic racism, that’s very interesting. Unfiltered antisocial inspirations. All of it could be linked to difficulties in the Tourette organon.”
“We haven’t thought of that,” she says.
Good. Maybe I can offer something useful after all.
“I’ve seen these expressions before, in my student days. You understand the Tourette organon?”
“I know it’s been intensely studied,” Carrilund says. “I’m not up on the latest.”
“The original syndrome was discovered by a Frenchman, Georges Gilles de la Tourette. It was characterized by involuntary tics and movements and by coprolalia—uncontrolled speaking of obscenity, dirty talk. In 2013, another Frenchman, Francois Cornier, extended the name to describe the actions of a continuum of brain functions in the limbic system. He called them the ‘imps of the perverse.’ He believed that much of the brain relies on impulses from these imps to maintain a high level of invention and preserve the self. Skepticism, doubt, social defense mechanisms, even certain physical motions related to disgust and rejection, all begin in the Tourette organon.
“The child acquires filters that select and screen out most of these impish impulses, but for someone with Tourette syndrome, there are leaks in the filters that allow sporadic outbursts.”
“Have you ever seen them in your ventures upcountry?” Carrilund asks. This stops Martin short.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry if I’m intruding.”
“Not at all. My former wife and I wrote several papers on the topic.”
“Your demon acquired from an unnamed patient.”
“You must know the details already,” Martin says dryly.
“Only what you published. What was it like?”
“Well, of course, the transfer was not that of an actual demon or even an aspect of the patient’s personality. We believed that traumatic experiences excited certain agents and sub-agents within our minds… which assumed the character of a dangerous sub-personality.”
“Was this Emanuel Goldsmith?” Carrilund asks quietly.
Martin’s face flushes and his hands tense on the edge of the couch. He does not answer.
“Sorry,” Carrilund says, turning away.
“Our own problems stemmed from…” He swallows, still angry but struggling to maintain. “From our Tourette organons assuming the character of this sub-personality. A bad influence, as it were.”
Carrilund turns back. “When I was a teenager, I had an irritating voice in my head, a character. It was a tramp, a filthy, disheveled male with a thin, dirty face, demented. All it did was sit in the back of my thoughts and say, ‘Give me some of that old Smoky Joe!’ It said it over and over again, with real enthusiasm. It wasn’t a major problem by any means—just an image I sometimes encountered, like a stupid tune you can’t shake. Would you classify that as a manifestation from my Tourette organon?”
“Perhaps,” Martin says. He is suddenly very tired.
“Mr. Burke, I apologize. But it seems to me you might have personal experience of what some of our clients are going through. If something is breaking down their mental architecture, stripping away their protection from old mental demons, you of all people will understand.”
Martin still does not meet her eyes.
“Would you like to go a little further?” she asks.
“Sorry… what?” He is confused by this offer, thinking of something else, of her seductiveness. He wants to get out of here, but his professional standing is at stake.
“The next level of our tracking center is quite remarkable,” she says.
“Yes, of course.” He lifts his hand and waves it. “Let’s go.”
The blue void reappears, and the atonal hum.
“We’ll enter a Pickover space,” Carrilund says. “Twelve variables condensed into four dimensions, using Lunde equations to join the state vectors.”
Martin hardly hears her. The blue void fogs abruptly and he has a sensation of rushing. Shadows pass in the fog; he knows a little of this kind of display. He once sampled a Pickover space while trying out graphic interfaces for patient mental stats; they are on the boundary of the real, in the murmurous potential of all possible domains of the twelve variables. INDA dreams, he thinks.
They are suddenly plunged into a lattice of massive twisted cellular shapes, their skins visible in intense, crystalline-detail; their interiors floating within, hinting at infinite densities. The shapes seem to be longer than they are thick, and weave together to form the lattice like strands in a basket viewed from the perspective of a microbe; but as their perspective changes, the apparent length of each cell changes as well.
In Pickover space, the viewer’s orientation in the three dimensions is interpreted as a request for compression and linking of new sets of variables, thus shifting the domains and smoothly altering the results. This much he remembers, though it has been a long time since he used such an interface.
“This is the entire Northwest, from the point of view of Workers Inc,” Carrilund says. Her voice seems very distant. “Human stats only, reflecting psychological, cultural, and economic conditions, with efficiency of dataflow and mental vitality reflected in flow of money, both treated as the power to command and accomplish work.”
“I see,” Martin said, overwhelmed by the scintillating surfaces, the vertiginous shifts caused by even the slightest motion of his head.
“Blue, green, and cream colors indicate variations within parameters considered healthy. Red and dark red show problem territories. Black and gray we call abscesses, or regions of severe instability leading to trenching of the relevant variables—strains in the economy and consequently, the society.”
“I presume we’re at the beginning of a time period,” Martin says.
“Right. Let’s travel across the past month.”
The “travel” is not through the lattice, like fish through kelp, but rather, the lattice fluxes
around them, as if the kelp is washed by subtle tides. Some of the cell-like bodies thin to nothing and vanish, but remain green and blue all the while: tiny spots of red appear like rash over the surfaces, and darker reds pulse within the cells, but vanish. A small indicator always at the lower right-hand corner of his visual field shows time passing, day after day.
The effect is hypnotic. Martin for a moment feels the startling sensation, like the jerk of an engaged clutch, as his analytical mind meshes with the display, and he understands the broad structure. The display is meant to fit into the autopoietic learning methods of parallel and webbed neural nets, particularly INDAs, human minds, and presumably thinkers. Given enough time and study, he really could grasp all that he is being shown, and he feels a bum of envy for this tool, made available to him for only a short while. So much could be solved, so much anticipated!
It is very much like going upcountry into the human mind, for this is a display used much the same way the mind uses its dreamlike country; even more like the extraordinary mandalas the mind uses to correlate its own health and functionality. He is lost in childlike awe. The lives and efforts of tens of millions pass before him: births and deaths, cultural ebbs and flows, trends and fashions, jobs taken and work done and jobs changed, romance and friendship, competition and cooperation, levels of maladaptive behavior including the criminal and the culturally repressed…
The red rashes are breaking out all over now. He looks at his time indicator. They are entering the past of one week ago. The cell-like bodies become as gaudy as sea slugs, and some glow like hot embers, with burned-out black spots and ashen surfaces expanding. He seems to be watching a fire in a dream jungle canopy, the branches glowing and leaves withering under heat and invisible flame.
“We’ll extrapolate now, speeding forward two years.” Carrilund’s voice jars him, like a pig’s squeal in a symphony. The time indicator whirs past. He turns his head and the green and blue and cream is chased by the red; the forest wriggles and slithers as if trying to escape and is scorched and then incinerated.
He drifts at the end of two years in a desolation of ash with a few subtle spots of green, then these too wink out.
Gray gives way to darkness, like ashes wetted by rain.
“Enough,” Carrilund says. The blue void and multicolored mist return, but not in time to save Martin’s dignity, He sits back on the couch, his cheeks damp. Carrilund is moved as well. She hands him a handkerchief, and he sees something less cool, more sympathetic, in her expression as she watches him wipe his eyes.
“I don’t know what to say,” Martin tells her.
“I’ve seen this three times now, and I don’t know what to say, either.”
“Is the whole culture getting sick—is it dying?”
“We’ve run this space twenty or thirty different ways, and the results come out the same.”
“Something is burning our people. There’s a fire in our minds,” Martin says.
“I’m glad you see it that way, too,” Carrilund says. Her voice sounds fragile. “I think to myself, someone is hurting my children. I think of our clients that way… I have no children of my own.”
She turns away, irritated at having revealed so much, but this allows Martin to regain his own composure.
“It’s a war, I don’t know what kind of war,” Carrilund says. “I wish I knew who or what was doing this.”
“I’d like to help, if I may,” Martin says.
“We need all the help we can get,” Carrilund says. “You hold the patent on most therapeutic monitors. Who better to advise us?” She stands and offers her hand. Martin slides off his couch a little awkwardly and shakes it.
As their bands touch, a loud and unpleasant horn alarm sounds in the room. They pull back and stand several feet apart, hands still extended. Carrilund glances at him, eyes wide.
A small but urgent female voice speaks out all around them: “This is an emergency alert to human operators.”
Carrilund stiffens and cocks her head; she has never experienced this before.
“This system has been breached. This system has been breached. All firewalls have been penetrated and information is being transferred to an outside system. Repeat: this is an emergency alert to human operators. Lockdown is not successful. This system—”
Carrilund runs from the room. Martin follows at a discreet distance, knowing the best thing he can do, for the time being, is stay out of the way.
12
Dinner is spare—hamburgers from a local takeout, a bottle of beer apiece, an apple. Giffey doesn’t mind. He’s been waiting for Hale to say his piece, put him in his place. Hale is low-key, not brash; preferring to bide his time rather than bursting out with his accumulated concerns.
They eat separately, Jenner joining Giffey in the office. The team has not yet found its center, nor does it have any sense of cohesion, and Giffey is sure Hale will bring that up. He seems a managerial rather than a dictatorial type. Giffey appreciates this, as far as it goes. But Giffey has his own agenda in this effort, and he will not let Hale’s sensibilities get in his way. There are bound to be some conflicts.
Mercifully, Jenner eats in silence. But for the creaking of the steel walls as they contract in the evening’s cold, the warehouse is quiet. Even in the overheated office, drafts of cold air slip through like flows of ghostly ice.
Hale knocks and enters before anybody answers. He looks at Giffey and smiles, a little falsely. “We need to have our talk now,” he says. Jenner stops in mid-chew, looks between them, then gathers up his plate and bottle and leaves. Hale sits in the chair behind the desk.
“I thought you’d like to settle some things before tomorrow,” Hale says. “And I have a few more questions to ask.”
“All right,” Giffey says, putting down his burger half-eaten.
Having stated his purpose, Hale seems reluctant to leap right in. “Meat’s meat here,” he says, pointing to Giffey’s plate. “In New York, it’s almost a sin to eat beef.”
“Yeah.”
Hale folds his hands on the desktop. “We’ve had very little time to get acquainted, Mr. Giffey. May I call you Jack?”
Giffey nods.
“Jack. This is my team, here. We’ve worked together before, in odd little jobs in and out of the country. I know these people and I trust them. Hally… she’s been with me for five years. That’s a long time in our line of work. Pickwenn and Pent… They’re oddballs, but they’ve never failed me. Park—I’ve never worked with him before, but he has a good reputation. You Jack…” Hale regards him with a flat, alert expression.
“You know nothing about me,” Giffey says.
“Or about Jenner.”
Giffey leans his head to one side, acknowledging that the situation is unusual.
“I understand that our window of opportunity is narrow, that your contacts and my contacts have never worked together before. And what I’ve been told about both of you… what I know about Park… is encouraging.”
“Same with your folks,” Giffey says.
“Thank you. The rules of engagement are that we agreed to say that I’m in charge. I get the feeling you’re used to being the one in command.”
“I’m flexible,” Giffey says.
“We’re in an awkward situation here, and there’s a lot of missing pieces to our side of this puzzle. I’m not used to that. This MGN concerns me. I have no idea in hell how you or anybody could get such stuff. I know—contacts in government and the military, Raphkind sympathizers, all dog-in-the-manger, and not hard to believe. But some of this stuff hasn’t even been hinted on the fibes. Yet here we are, with you and Jenner, relying on stuff that supposedly doesn’t even exist to overcome what may very well be stiff resistance inside Omphalos.”
Hale licks his lips and leans his head back. “I appreciate your trying to keep it all in perspective, calm us down about what to expect, but I don’t find any of this calming. My people were not told about Ferrets, and we weren’t told about th
is MGN, or why we should even have it. I am frankly concerned on both accounts.”
“I understand.”
“I’d like to know more about your sources. Procurement. Where Jenner comes in, his past experience… If it’s any exchange, I’ll level with you about my people.”
Giffey stares down at his clasped hands. “I am as ignorant about some of this as you are. Mr. Park made some of the arrangements, and he brought us together. Perhaps you should discuss this with him.”
“Park works with people who expect big returns on their investment. He doesn’t talk much, and he doesn’t like to put himself in danger. But getting MGN is as much a surprise to him as it is to me. Have you met Park before, or worked for him?”
“I’ve worked for his superiors… indirectly.”
Hale lifts his eyebrows, encouraging Giffey to continue.
“I can’t say any more about that.”
Hale backs down for a moment. “Pickwenn and Pent are the best in this business. They tell me Omphalos may be vulnerable, but they also tell me we’ll have to get inside to find out where those vulnerabilities are.”
“We’ve known that from the beginning,” Giffey says.
Hale’s face screws up in sudden, childish frustration. “God dammit, Jack, you don’t seem at all concerned about how shoved together, how last-minute this is.”
“High risk for high gain,” Giffey says.
Hale throws this off with a toss of his hand. “I know the Aristos, Jack. I’ve worked with people who worked with them at various times on various jobs. I’ve come to know their operations, but they don’t know anything about me. That’s how I’ve managed to get us this appointment. They are not nice people, not at the top. I don’t know about the lackeys, but the guys at the top—they are vicious, cold, and arrogant. They scare me, but I hate them more than I’m afraid of them.”
“So it all balances out. Gain, risk, a blow against the big bad boys.”
“Do you know what kind of connections the Aristos have in government?” Hale asks.
