Black Glass

by John Shirley

  “Could have been—that takes in most of the Fortune 33. Hoffman, Bill Hoffman—he’s a good possibility. You sure we can’t arrange a workplace misfortune for Candle before he walks out that door?”

  “Everything that happens in that jail is monitored, black boxed. We still can’t get into those boxes. It’d be hard to pull off without a lot of preparation, a lot of heavy bribery. By then he’ll be back on the streets with his full mind—and his memory.”

  Grist sniffed. “Easy enough to kill him once he’s out. But if we don’t—maybe we can make lemonade, Targer. I’d like to know who’s eating my lunch on this. Someone’s engineered this release to fuck with me. They’ll contact Candle ...”

  “Maybe.”

  “Who’ve you got on this?”

  “Halido. And I’ve got Pup Benson on the inside, but I don’t know what he can do with the cameras watching ... He’s not much use anyway.”

  “All right ... Let me talk to Halido. Put him up there.” Targer tapped the desk and a ‘window’ sectioned on its display, sunken-eyed Hispanic guy in a stained baseball cap, turning to look at the floating video-eye, backpedaling. The camera moved in on him: there was a star made of diamonds in one of Halido’s incisors. “Jesus, Targer, you got a remote bird following me?”

  “Shut up. Mr. Grist wants to talk to you.”

  “I don’t see him.”

  “And you won’t, either. Shut up and listen.”

  Grist knew it irritated Targer to step down the chain of command this way, but there was a nasty variable out there. Candle. A human X-factor. It made Grist feel good to deal with it hands-on.

  “Halido,” Grist said, “if Candle gets out, don’t kill him until I tell you. Stay with him. Report every time he contacts anybody or anybody contacts him.”

  “You got it, sir.”

  Grist waved at Targer, and Halido blinked out, replaced with a view down the fairway.

  The screen said, “Legal calling, Mr. Grist.”

  Grist shook his head. “Have my semblant talk to them.”

  “Yes sir ...”

  “Targer?” Grist said, in that way he had.

  “I know,” Targer said. “‘Get it done’.” He made a dour salute and went back to the chopper.

  Candle had almost finished throwing up. Wait ... Okay, there. He was finished. He straightened up, looking around the prison bathroom, touching the bare spot at the base of his skull where the Minding clamp had been.

  Looking around himself, really looking, for the first time in ... how long had it been? How long had the sentence been for? For some reason, he couldn’t remember. Exactly. Years, anyway. What did he see, now, after those years?

  A row of exposed toilets, tiles, stainless steel, everything brightly robot cleaned; a small oval robot was working its way slowly along the wall, under the sink, cleaning as it went.

  “You done or what?” the guard asked him. BENSON on his name pin.

  Candle nodded, drinking water from the dispenser. He rinsed his mouth. “Is this normal?”

  “What, throwing up after you get your mind put back in you? Oh yeah, everybody does it, I guess. Throwing up ’cause they got to be themselves again. Face their shit lives. That was always my theor–”

  He stopped in mid-syllable, as Candle turned to look at him, wiping his mouth. Must have looked at the guy harder than he knew because the guard stepped back and put one hand on the beeper on his belt, the other raising his Recoil Reversal stick.

  “You fuck with me, you’ll never get out of here, pal,” Benson said.

  “Your voice always shake like that when you’re trying to scare people, Benson?” Candle asked, rubbing his eyes.

  Then, without being told to, Candle went out the door, into the prison corridor. After a moment the guard followed. Glancing back, Candle saw Benson was pissed off. But he didn’t seem inclined to do anything about it.

  Good on both counts.

  “You’re a ...” The psychiatrist paused to look at the screen inset into the top of his desk again. “... Buddhist. Oh, a ‘Shiva Buddhist’?” The psychiatrist’s cubicle featured the requisite Monet prints and framed certificates; the psychiatrist had a flattop haircut, a blunt, lined faced, and a blunt manner. Probably a former military doctor.

  “Shiva Buddhist ... the term confuses people,” Candle said wearily. He didn’t feel like talking about it. His stomach was still lurching. Sometimes the little room seemed to lurch too. He shifted in the uncomfortable plastic chair. “That stuff about Shiva Buddhism. Not really much to do with Hindu gods. Some of the Tibetans stuck in the People’s Republic stayed Buddhist but ...” He shrugged. “... insisted on armed resistance. During the Tibetan Diaspora, some of them picked up some Hindu symbolism, living in India ... fits with the idea of armed resistance.”

  “So philosophically they—and you—can kill an enemy and still remain a Buddhist. It would seem to be a ... distortion of old Gautama’s teaching.”

  “Depends on which Buddhists you’re talking to: always has. In this case it’s an adaptation. A recognition of the ...” The words seemed to drain from his mind, for a few moments. He shook himself.

  “Some aphasia is normal, at first, after a ReMinding,” the psychiatrist said.

  “... of the, um, interconnectedness of ... of life and death. Does my philosophy matter?”

  Ludicrous to be talking about this now, he thought. He just wanted to get outside the damn building. Someplace private where he could scream if he wanted to.

  “I do have a point. My job is to help you realize that no harm has come to you here, that you are not damaged, no one has abused your body sexually, nothing like that–” They both knew that wasn’t necessarily true. The psychiatrist went on: “—and I thought if you came to regard the absence of your mind these few years as being a kind of state blissful non-being, almost a nirvana ...” The psychiatrist winced as if he’d realized he’d said something stupid. “Well, most of our people, when they get out, they have this feeling like ... like something died when they were absent. Like ... one man called it ‘a dead hole in me’. Partly it’s the absence of memories—most of it is just fear generated by not knowing what’s happened to you all that time. We can provide some camera footage of your daily routine–”

  “No,” Candle said sharply. “No thanks. I don’t think I’ll find a home movie of me as a zombie reassuring.”

  “Very well. We should review your psychological history together—I can arrange therapy for you on the outside.”

  “Not necessary,” Candle said firmly.

  “Are you sure? You have a problematic life history. According to the files, your father was the manager of several rock bands. You and your brother grew up around rock musicians. Studios, back stage parties. Your parents had drug issues, your father especially. Mother more of an alcoholic, although at times ...”

  “Wait—where are you getting this from? This business about my old lady wasn’t in my HR files at the department–”

  “You underwent a deep background check to get National Security clearance when you were a computer cop.”

  “I don’t remember any of that coming up during my background check.”

  “They didn’t tell you. They just investigated you. We’re up to Patriot Act Nine now—that gives me access. Now to go on ... Your father died of a drug overdose. You were fourteen. Your brother was a little younger ... Your mother disappeared when you were seventeen. Presumed dead. However–”

  “That’s fucking enough,” Candle said sharply. “Tell you what—you want to make me feel better? Open that fucking door and let me walk through it.”

  The psychiatrist’s eyes went flat. His hand strayed to the alarm pad on his desk.

  “There ... are the aggression tests to do. If you seem like you might fly out of control, once out there, after the downloading, well—you’d need therapy time first ...”

  Candle reined himself in. He forced a smile, spread his hands as casually as he could. “Give me
the test, Doctor. I’m not hating on anybody. I just want to get out there and see my little brother.”

  Thinking, as he said it: One thing I know how to do is fake a negative reading on an aggression test.

  THIS TEXT GOTTA BE

  CHAPTER TWO—

  —PERSONAL SHIT ‘TWEEN ME ’N’ YOU

  Thirteen of the Fortune 33 in the same room at the same time ...

  They sat uneasily around the long oval table, the transparent wall to one side adjusting, filtering the harsher spectra from the sunset; off-white marble walls on three sides; the corporate logo centered on the wall behind the chairman. In the middle of the high ceilinged rectangle of the Slakon International boardroom was a long glossy-black table inset with charcoal gray consoles, smart panels, light-pens, discreetly recessed displays. There were glasses of wine and carafes of Italian coffee; Bill Hoffman had Earl Grey tea. One console, one refreshment, for each board member waiting for Grist to come to the point. Chairman Grist sat at the head of the table, using the—as Hoffman had once put it—“Sharply unsubtle psychology of sitting right under the corporate logo ...”

  It was rare for the major shareholders to be in the same room, physically, at the same time.

  The irony wasn’t lost on Hoffman. “What was the reason we were supposed to meet in person?” he asked Grist, his voice silky. “Something about ... security? As if we couldn’t trust screens and semblants? This from the man who insisted we put three billion WD into semblant tech? Semblant tech is supposed to be secure. It is—isn’t it?” He smiled, and the smile said: Hey, I’m just kidding you—only I’m really not. I’m not fucking with you. Only, I am. I’m doing it in a way I can get away with, not that I care very much.

  The smile, the whole expression said all that and more, and everyone knew it.

  But his semblant could have expressed the same thing. Hoffman had shoulder-length white hair, receding from a high, lined, tanned forehead; he was an elegant man who could have been anywhere from forty-five to seventy-five. He wore an old-fashioned gray suit and silvery tie; no wristpad, just a silver Rolex he’d had for fifty years, with dial-hands on it. His face was mostly natural—but Grist assumed he had subtle de-aging nanosurgery. Just enough to retain the dignity and power of an older man, while his face kept the crisp lines of youth.

  “You know why we’re here in person,” Grist said, sipping red wine, maintaining his own carefully tooled smile as he swiveled to look out at the rusty sky. “Because you plan to make accusations.” He pronounced it ack-kew-ZA-tions, stretching it out with aching mockery. “And one leaked accusation—one public sign of a rupture in trust on the board—can make the stock value shrivel like ...” He smiled. “... a deflated balloon. So it’s best we minimize the danger of hacker surveillance. Meaning we meet in person. Now ... Mr. Hoffman?” Grist spread his hands, looking around at the others, to say: I just want to get this tiresome business over with ...

  And he glanced around, wondering how unified they were behind Hoffman.

  The Japanese nano-synth chief, Yatsumi, sat straight-backed and quizzical. Beside Yatsumi, the only woman here, except for the rep from Poland, was Claire PointOne, the tall, blond, needle-thin Vice President of Systems Marketing. She’d adopted the odd surname for her own obscure reasons; now she seemed coiled in round-shouldered tension, the elbows in her blue silk suit planted on the table, her long, pale fingers clasped in front of her. She looked fragile—but Grist was aware she held black belts in two forms of martial arts, and was always looking for the main opportunity. Ready to leap into any power vacuum.

  The Texas exec, Hank Bulwer—CEO of Southern Cross Inc, a fiber-optics and GPA firm that was now a subsidiary of Slakon—was a thick man with a ruddy face that made grist think of undercooked meat. He toyed with an empty glass, lips pursed.

  The stocky Mexican banking exec, Alvarez, in his creamy sweater, gnawed a knuckle. There was a formless anxiety in his dark eyes: a natty, darkly handsome man, charming when he wanted to be; vaguely repulsive to Grist at other times. Prone to watching Claire.

  The others didn’t matter as much—they were comparatively minor players: Poland Industrial Consortium, Wang Kwan Timed Investments, Moscow Stock Exchange, London Computer Temps, El-Abid Microchips, and Haim Marchson from GlobalWeb: a slim, amazingly superficial man who got a new face from a model catalogue once a year. Marchson always did exactly what Grist told him simply because of what Grist knew about him and the child-star, Dil Windy.

  As if bored, Grist shrugged and muttered to his console, prompting a movie-theatre-scale sheet of mediaglass to slide soundlessly from the ceiling over the wall to his right, the display already scrolling international financial data in seven categories. Grist pretended to be deeply interested, and the others couldn’t help looking at it.

  Hoffman’s lips compressed, the smile almost squeezed out. “I don’t have time, Hoffman,” Grist said, gazing deep into the columns of data waterfalling-by on the screen, “for these PiP appearances. It is my understanding that you have accusations to make. If you have something real, please share it.”

  Hoffman shrugged. “It was you who demanded the in-person meeting.”

  “We were all in town at the same time anyway, except for Hernando–” Grist nodded at Alvarez, “ and he didn’t have far to come.”

  “Always something useful to do in Los Angeles,” Alvarez said quickly. It was well known he liked escaping from his home in Mexico City and the politically charged social functions his wife was always pressuring him to go to. Consuelo Alvarez had ambitions to be first lady—and if Alvarez didn’t make President of Mexico, largely a symbolic position nowdays after all, she might at least be the wife of the Minister of Finance. Alvarez started to light a cigarette, and everyone instantly turned to glare at him.

  “If you’re going to smoke,” Hoffman said, “please do it hygienically.”

  “Yes, yes, bueno,” Alvarez said hastily, “Sorry. To be mastered by smoke—a shame, really. My father made his money in tobacco but he always said ... said I shouldn’t ...”

  He lit the cigarette, then hastily put his cigarette case on the table, pressed a stud on the side, and a SmokeSucker appeared, standing at his side. The SmokeSucker image was in the form of a life-sized, transparent, attractive, skimpily dressed Latino-Asian woman, smiling sweetly, her shape conforming to the magnetic field projected by the cigarette case. The SmokeSucker bent over, opened her mouth suggestively, and sucked the smoke from his cigarette and his exhalation, drawing it into a single stream, and then into her body. The smoke swirled inside the field-hologram, bottled like a soul in a body; when he was done smoking the image would blow the particulates into the compression chamber in the back of the cigarette case. Bulwer stared at the SmokeSucker, licking his lips, his eyes glazing.

  Grist shook his head and sighed, but let it stand, though he found the shapely SmokeSucker distracting.

  “That smoke sucker thing is really tacky,” Claire said, looking more disgusted than offended.

  Hoffman’s smart-chair changed shape as he leaned back into it. “So. Let’s get on with it. A few observations ... One: You, Grist, introduced us to the semblant process–”

  “To the great profit of our shareholders,” Grist interrupted complacently. “And Slakon thrives on pleasing its shareholders.”

  “Two: Some of our semblant programs have been compromised, quite probably copied,” Hoffman went on, as if he hadn’t heard. “They copied Yatsumi’s semblant program, so I understand—Claire’s, Alvarez’s, Bulwer’s—someone’s copied their semblants out of me-trix databases ... Three: You have the only ‘ware that could make use of these encoded me-trixes–”

  “That’s a naive assumption,” said Grist. “Someone’s always a step ahead of us, somewhere. Some hacker, some roaming coffee shop Bedouin.” ‘Coffee-shop Bedouin’ was an outmoded term but Grist had always liked the sound of it. “Obviously someone else wanted your semblants. And, humiliating and embarrassing as it is for me to even
have to say this: I really don’t have the faintest possible motive–”

  “Yes, truly, my friends,” Alvarez said, his voice a little muffled by the cigarette—Alvarez was one of those annoying people, Grist noticed, who liked to talk without taking their smokes out of their mouth. Possibly it was Old Time Movie damage. “This is not appropriate, to make accusations based on ... on supposition.”

  “I must agree, it is inappropriate,” Yatsumi said, in his clipped intonation.

  “I’ve been in this business too long,” Hoffman said, “to kiss anyone’s hind-parts. You two may do it for me, if you like.”

  Yatsumi stiffened; Alvarez coughed.

  “As to motive,” Hoffman continued, “if you have our semblants, Grist, you have us, in a way. Which might eliminate, well, so many inconveniences—like opinions which diverge from your own.”

  “Oh, for—this really is outrageous, Hoffman,” Claire PointOne said, looking wistfully at Alvarez’s cigarette. She hadn’t smoked in years, but one never entirely lost the craving. “Unless ... in the unlikely event you have some definite evidence ...”

  “Perhaps I do,” Hoffman said. “Perhaps I’m going to play the proverbial cards close to the proverbial vest.”

  Grist shook his head, chuckling. “You’re suggesting I’ve stolen your semblants and I’m going to use them for some shady purpose? We haven’t always been simpatico, Hoffman, but—that’s sort of pitiful, really. Even ... diagnosably paranoid.”

  “Paranoia is a skill,” Hoffman said firmly, unruffled. “Since I led the vote to have your finances frozen during the multioptions audit—well, we’ve had to resort to mediators three times, you and I, on three separate issues. And I suspect you’re through mediating.” He stood. “If the rest of you wish to be used in this way—that is your own affair. Up to a point.”

  He walked out of the boardroom, followed by Grist’s snort of derision, ten voices of objection, and one muffled cough.