by John Shirley
“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!”
The spot showed the exec leaning back in an easy chair, colorful cocktail in one hand, the other hand resting lightly on the thigh of the pretty blond announcer. Wearing elegantly-draped long, filmy blue lingerie, she was now perched with an improbable buoyancy on the arm of his chair. Behind them a multiply-windowed screen showed the exec’s semblants taking digital meetings, screens cheerfully talking to other, endlessly replicating screens ...
“Take care of business ...”
“... with Slakon semblants!” the exec chimed in, lifting his glass to the camera.
Then the final tagline from an authoritative male voice: “They’ll believe ... you really are there!”
Small disclaimers zipped by at the bottom of the image: Contracts closed by semblants are not legally binding unless Self-Certified.
There was another version for women execs. Grist reckoned both of them too on-the-nose vulgar for their target audience. And too retro.
Grist hit call back, using his standard business semblant, the digital face matching what he was saying. But the face Mitwell saw was composed, sober, attached to a fully dressed body. No live cam of his nudity for Mitwell. “Mitwell? I hate it! Too in-your-face, too retro. Like something from the last century ... ugh.”
“I think it was supposed to be campy that way or something.”
“We don’t do campy. Get something arty, something without all this stiff voiceover business. Get Jerome-X or somebody to do music-vid. I understand he’s finally Sold Corporate. Get on it.”
Grist clicked off line and drank some more brandy. “You wanta drink, Lisha?”
“Nah-uh.”
“You sulking?”
“Nah-uh.”
“No?” He had an impulse to please her. Strange, since he should be angry with her using lube to be able to make it with him, but he felt apologetic, in some undefined way. “Wanta take your little round ass shopping?”
“Yeah!” She suddenly sat up, all perky, playing a happy little girl, beaming.
Happy little girl; but it was almost his face, and suddenly he was reminded of himself as a little boy.
Little boy in Los Angeles. Back before they built the dike to protect L.A. from the rising seas. That far back. Visiting his dad at the Jet Propulsion Lab. The tight-assed old son of a bitch already dying of cancer, but refusing to leave his desk until they pushed him out the door. His dad blinking at him from his office chair—hunched there, feet gripping the floor as if he were physically resisting being pushed out for the next guy; an emaciated comma of a man, trying to remember why the boy was there. Not quite saying, “Why are you here?” And the boy not quite saying, “This is part of your visitation, I was supposed to see you at work.” Later at home, overhearing Mom talking on the phone to her sister about losing the child support money when Dad died. Her main concern. Money trumped death. It was a lesson.
He wanted to be alone, and just get numbdumb. He rolled over, turned up the vapors, and set the cameras on playback.
Dow Jones/Pacific Industries tickered digitally by, on the ceiling, underneath the images of himself and Lisha hard at it. His previous contract wife had been annoyed when he checked out the trading while he was banging her.
Without even looking at Lisha, he keyed in an additional ten grand for her card. Sending her shopping. Wanting her gone as quickly as possible. “There you go ...” he murmured.
Lisha kissed him on the cheek when “transfer approved” appeared on the screen and she hopped out of the bed, psyched for shopping.
It’s like guarding robots, Pup thought. What’s the point?
The only true robot here, though, was a single robot security guard, a vertical column on wheels with two extender arms, that rumbled slowly back and forth, scanning IDs, biometrically cross referencing faces, and otherwise having nothing to do in the long low cinderblock room. A cloudy armor-glass ceiling lit the room with shadowless uniformity. A room of men ministering to machines; the chuffing-squeak of hard metal kissing soft metal; a faint clanking, a whirring, the occasional comment of one guard to another and a pensive absence of other human noises. The machine shaped and programmed license plates with the digital likeness of the owner imaged in, the face of the licensee shifting back and forth between face-on and profile, the LP numbers scrolling slowly by next to the face, over and over. Now and then some legislator grumped about the slower pace of plate manufacture, with human beings operating the machines—the whole thing could have been entirely automated, but the law said the men had to have some kind of physical employment. Make-work, busy work for human hands.
Those human hands were Candle’s, now, and Garcia’s, expressionlessly pushing plates under the digiprinter, taking them out, while other men sorted plates by region numbers: other UnMinded whose identities were irrelevant—living cartoons of men, like the animated bot figures in digi-games, making rote motions, without the bitching and sniping that should have made them human. And without relationships, often troublesome relationships, between prisoners. No friendships could blossom in the aridity of UnMinding—and no enmities.
It bothered Pup; he never got used to it. There was no risk here. No interpersonal “heat” of any kind, from a man utterly subordinated to a device clamped to the base of his skull.
So it was almost a relief when, once or twice a year, one of the prisoners made a mistake. Maybe the machinery stuck, or maybe the prisoner was moving slowly because of—who knows?—a virus the blood monitors had missed.
Today it was the machine: the imager needed cleaning, and a plate got stuck, halfway out, and Garcia automatically reached in and pulled and the imager came unstuck suddenly, stamping to imaging-range, a quarter-inch from the plate, and—crunch, the bones of Garcia’s hand were shattered.
Garcia didn’t react—and that made Pup’s gut lurch worse than the crunch. Feeling no pain, Garcia didn’t even pull his hand out, and the imager came down again as Pup ran over to jerk him free, a second too late—the hand was crushed out of shape, it was bloody toothpaste coming out of a flattened glove, and Pup almost heaved.
Stremp heard the injury alarm, came rushing in—and made a snorting sound as if it were Pup’s fault. “Garcia 667329, go to the infirmary.”
Garcia walked calmly and obediently—hand dripping a trail of blood—out the door. They knew he’d go where he was sent, and of course the cameras were watching, anyway.
Stremp called to Sokio Wojakowski, the Japanese guard, or half Japanese, and told him to watch things, they were going to have to do a digifile report on the injury, even though the whole thing had already been boxed by the monitoring cam, and—Stremp glanced at his watch—it was just about time to ReMind Candle out, too.
Grist was leaning back in the perfect embrace of his desk chair, looking out the transparent office wall, watching the chopper land on the helipad just outside and thinking how much the new Casimir-force-assisted choppers looked like they were a detached part of the buildings they were landing on: smooth metal and glass curves, almost no seams, and the same colors as the building, the Slakon metallic blue and chrome with thin stripes of flat red. The chopper landing was like a limb reconnecting to a body. Which was good. Everything about the company should look like that; everything should suggest cohesion, centralized purpose. Sometimes he thought corporate authority was 90% architecture and engineering design.
Soothing thoughts helped him keep his temper. Underneath, he was seething. The risk that Candle might get out. And the accusations from Bill Hoffman. The board accusing him of hacking them—accusing him as much as it dared.
Targer was just stepping down from the chopper, trotting across to the door. Not looking at Grist as he came because he couldn’t see through the window from his side. Grist told the smart desk to open the door so Targer wouldn’t have to waste time with the security IDs.
About fifty, Target
had hair the color of steel, nose like an eagle’s beak, not a jot of wasted energy in his movements. He was British, as much as anyone was anymore; most socialized people were WorldWeb, with not a great deal of hometown culture left. Target wore his Slakon Security uniform, quietly paramilitary. Not surprised that Grist wanted to see him “PiP”, physically in person. This was high security stuff.
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop Candle’s release,” Targer said flatly, without preliminaries.
Grist leaned forward, and removed the UV goggles he’d hitched on top of his head to hold back his glossy hair. He’d just come in from the putting green on the other side of the roof.
He tossed the goggles on the desk in irritation, waving Targer to a chair. The other three walls of the room were displays, two with real-time shots of the Rockies in heavy snow, places Grist liked to ski; one of the walls showing Grist’s best moments as a golfer, playing in a loop. A perpetually sunny, successful day on the links, that wall.
“It was your job to keep him in jail, Targer. I gave you a fat bonus to keep him in jail. You’re my fucking Security. And now I don’t feel secure.” He looked away from one of his few holes-in-one, and directly at Targer, who didn’t blink. “This is pretty fucking insecure, Targer.”
“I did advise you to kill him, sir,” Targer said, with maddening calm.
Grist grunted. “Too much scrutiny on Candle.” He sighed. “... but I should have done it.”
“It wasn’t easy to get him put away. Candle was a decorated federal cop with a lot of friends. Senator Williger–”
“Senator Williger! I should have gotten rid of that asshole too!”
Targer nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Is Williger behind the quick release?”
“Maybe. Don’t think so. He’s busy with that Korean girls’ school scandal. I don’t see it being him. Someone in the privatized layer of government, I’m guessing. Someone with judicial connections. Lot of ex-cops there, maybe loyal to Candle. Or it could have been a competitor—found out about it. Wanting to do you shady.”
