Black Glass

by John Shirley

“No-fucking-BUY-THAT, asshole! Forget it, hode!”

  “Come on, come on! ‘I hooked in and found you—’”

  “No, no, no, NO—Oh all right—‘found you on—’”

  “‘—Level five!’”

  The image froze—Candle with eyes closed, laughing, Danny with his lower lip thrust out in parody of a bad-ass rocker, eyes crinkled with glee at the irony, guitar aimed at the ceiling—

  The image froze—and cut to another scene, another day. The second time she’d filmed them. The afternoon had started off all right but Danny had decided he was going to get some virtual high ...

  The holo showed Danny stalking toward the door, Candle going after him, grabbing his arm. As Danny shook loose, Candle glaring at Zilia. “Turn that shit off!” But she had ignored him, continued filming as Danny said, “You’re a cop, that don’t make you a judge, Rick.”

  “You go down there, you don’t come back here.”

  “Hey, the Ghost Machine is an inspiration thing. I come home and I write songs–”

  “Bullshit. It’s a just greasy-ass addiction much as our old man on sniff X.”

  “It ain’t a chemical, man–”

  “Come on, hode, that kind of virtual reality is against the law for a reason. They fuck with your brain, Danny, it’s the same thing, it’s just remote drugging. It’s more than just some fucking fantasy–”

  Danny pulled back his coat—exposing a pistol in his waist band. Carved into the ivory handle was the image of a skull screaming into a microphone.

  “You follow me,” Danny said, with icy conviction, “and that’ll be the last fucking time you’ll ever see me if you don’t buy a ticket.”

  He turned away, and walked out of the shot. Candle, in the holo—and now—shook his head. And both Candles said, at once: “You dumb son of a bitch.”

  The Rick Candle in the holo turned and strode angrily toward the camera. “I said turn that fucking thing–”

  The holo vanished.

  “Thanks, Zilia,” Candle said, now.

  He went to the door, opened it, turned back for a moment as she said softly, not looking at him, “I want to know where he is, Rick. And ... if you want, if you get hard up, you can stay here and we can ... you know, talk and shit ...”

  “I thought you said I gave you the ugly quivers?”

  She shot him a glare. “You want to lose the invitation, just keep giving me shit.”

  He grinned at her, waved, and went down to the wet streets.

  Turned out Flip’n’Chip had bought out Wireless Shack three years earlier.

  Looking in the window of the discount electronics store, Candle watched the words and images, that seemed to be built into the window, but animated:

  NEWEST VR DATS

  ULTIMATE PRIVACY IS INSIDE YOUR SKULL!

  DO IT ALL!

  ANOTHER MIND ADVENTURE

  FROM SLIPSTREAM PROD

  FULLY COMPLIANT WITH VIRTUAL REALITY CONTROL LAW OF 2024

  Under the display, a panel of mediaglass played a piece of a VR encounter, a man and two women, nude and engaged in a three-way, floating alone in a rubber raft in the sea, their genitals blurred for street consumption.

  To one side was a wafer-thin screen on which, soundlessly, a presidential press conference was ending, the president—an Asian-American woman, who had been vice president when he went under—was waving as she walked away from the podium. He couldn’t recall her name. The credits said the press conference was sponsored by “Slakon Automotive: Today’s Car for Tomorrow’s Needs. And by Slakon Sportswear. And by Slakon Digital. . . Slakon Pharmaceuticals ... Slakon Entertainment ...”

  “Slakon,” Candle murmured. “Slakon.” Paul Slake, the guy who’d started Slakon, forty years earlier, probably wouldn’t recognize it now, if he were around to see it.

  But Candle was looking at something else in the window: the reflection of the curvaceous, glossy black sedan pulling up behind him. The car window started to roll down.

  “You could at least change cars, dumbshit,” Candle said, and ducked around the corner.

  Candle heard the car back up and he dodged into a men’s boutique. An over-bright place; flamboyant men’s clothing. He was still wearing his jeans and bomber jacket from four years ago. The fashions in the boutique made him wince as he hurried to put mannequins and displays between him and the guy following ...

  Those short little jackets. Aren’t we precious ... And string neckties were back in style, at least among the set that could afford to spend a few hundred WDs on fashion accessories. Shit.

  He paused to peer from behind a mannequin at the thug following him. Hispanic guy, pitted face, baseball cap, long black coat, coming in with a clip-phone pressed to his ear. Calling for back-up. Candle thought he recognized the guy from some perp file on the job.

  Halido, was that the name?

  Candle let Halido see him slip through the door that went to the changing booths.

  Halido heard someone yelling, “Hey, get your hands off me–” A high-pitched voice, but he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. He ran down the hallway to the changing booths—and heard a woman screaming from the one at the end. He went to the booth and drew his gun.

  Angry voices, a woman and man, interrupting each other from inside the booth—the booth shook as someone was pushed against the wall–

  Halido checked the load on his gun. Just follow him—but better to kill him than let him get away ...

  Grist probably hadn’t meant this situation exactly, but, you know, he could tell Grist anything so long as Candle stopped being a problem—

  Halido glanced around to see if there was any kind of surveillance bird flying around. No, nothing.

  Just get this fucking thing over with. Just fucking kill Candle.

  “Get out of here, you sleazin’ troll!” the woman yelled.

  “Lady, I’d like to, but I’m stuck in your–”

  Halido kicked the door open, leveled the gun. A fat, balding guy in his underwear was shoved outward by the half-dressed Filipina; the fat man sprawled on his belly at Halido’s feet. “I didn’t wanna go in there, you can’t arrest me,” he yelled, covering his head, “—some asshole shoved me in there and the door was blocked—”

  Okay, Halido thought, he thinks he’s cute because he can use a decoy. But the fucker is around here somewhere. He was on foot, he’s got to be close.

  Halido ran into the main store, and bang, stumbled right into a robot mannequin of an elegant model: Candle had pushed it from behind, left it blocking the door.

  “STAY WHERE YOU ARE. YOU ARE SHOPLIFTING AND VANDALIZING,” the mannequin said. “STAY WHERE YOU ARE–” The mannequin grabbed Halido and held him with whirring arms. “YOU ARE UNDER CAMERA OBSERVATION–”

  Halido struggled, but he knew you couldn’t get away from an anti-shoplifting mannequin until it was remote-switched, any more than you could get a detainer boot off your car without the code.

  “The son of a bitch ...” He managed to access his phone. “Targer? I’m gonna need back-up—Pup Benson? That’s bullshit. No, you gotta do better than that! I’m gonna need major backup—”

  “STAY WHERE YOU ARE, YOU ARE UNDER CAMERA OBSERVATION–”

  “—and probably bail.”

  Grist watched with increasing dysphoria as Gulliver Sykes, breathing through his mouth and muttering, pottered around the brushed steel worktable in Lab 4D, a laboratory physically within three other labs. The surrounding labs developed non-allergenic cosmetics; this lab was encircled by the others for reasons of disinformational security.

  Grist disliked spending time with Sykes. Gulliver Sykes was déclassé. He was a pop-eyed, fortyish, dyspeptic, overweight computer neurologist; he wore grubby T-shirts in the lab; he picked his nose and wiped it on his cargo pants; he was usually three days short a shave. His proximity reflected badly on a man. Grist stared at the belly drooping over Sykes’s belt.

  “Sykes—you know, as a Slakon employee at the Prime
Executive level, you have free access to the forming clinics. One two-day visit would eliminate all that unsightly fat. You can have a complete nano-surgery on that face too, if you wanted, for free. Idealize it. I mean after this project comes in. Just for employee morale–”

  “No nuh no nuh no! Thank you very much! I don’t have the time ... or the inclination,” Sykes said, wheezing between phrases, his hands busy at a horseshoe-shaped smart console, his eyes flickering between two screens and a holotank. “That sort of thing is all sociobiological-reproductive plumage, altering one’s appearance, and I haven’t any use for that—I get complete satisfaction with virtual sex, I have the best sex suit, and a good relationship with a very accommodating, learning-capable program which, unlike a real female, I can switch off as I please. Plus, cellular reduction and reformation is time consuming—I haven’t two or three days to waste getting my body altered—and it’s all very well to say I could take two days off, but about the time I tried to do it you’d drop something else in my lap and say you want it finished yesterday ...”

  “At the very least you could wear some shoes instead of those grubby sandals ...”

  “I have warts, they are encouraged by being enclosed in—oh, there you go, there you go, there, there–” And putting on VR glasses, he turned to look at the Multisemblant hardware.

  The lab room annoyed Grist too—it was like more like a teenager’s bedroom than a lab, untidy, murkily lit, the gear crowded on the main table making him think of a model of a city skyline, but made out of apparently random computer hardware, some of it connected, some not. He recognized holotanks and self-generating chip growers. And there were a dozen empty ephedrine cola containers, and yellow Envirofoam take-out cartons mixed in with the gear. But the main server of the semblant hardware, behind a sheet of armorglass, was a contrast. Austere cleanliness protected the sensitive semblant tech. Dust could make a semblant psychotic.

  Centered on a table between two huge displays, the Multisemblant array encompassed six crystal disks inset in a circle, as if at the points of a star, inside a small holo tank. In the center of the circle was a seventh disk. The whole Multisemblant array, once disconnected from the drive, was compact enough to fit into a suitcase. “Got it ... got i-i-i-t ...”

  “You have?” Grist frowned. “Where? I don’t see anything.”

  Sykes reached blindly for an Ephe-Cola with one hand as he stared into the holo tank, operating a sphere board with the other hand, and nearly knocked drink over, so Grist put the can in his hand. Sykes drank, all the while tickling the sphere board with his free hand. Cola streamed down his chin. “You’ll see it, you will, truly ... Doing a test-merge now ... you will ... you will ... Here we go, here we ... go. There, how’s that!”

  Nothing appeared on the array platform. “You’re seeing it virtually, you idiot, it’s not externalized for me.”

  “Oh, yes, yes, I’m sorry. External line ... there.”

  Three holographic human heads appeared on three of the six disks: the visual representation of the semblants of Claire, Grist, and Bulwer.

  The three heads blinked at Grist, as they were programmed to do. They perceived him through a fiber optic camera, a pinhole at the base of the array, but of course the images were designed to look at him as if seeing him from their holographic eyes. “Bulwer” squinted; “Claire” looked at him balefully; “Grist” winked.

  “What about the others?” the real Grist asked. “What about Hoffman?”

  “Problems with Hoffman—it’s simply giving me problems.”

  “Not surprising, somehow.”

  “And the Japanese language template in the Yatsumi semblant—it creates some kind of differential wave, ripple noise–”

  “We may have to use a truncated Yatsumi semblant. At least at first,” Grist suggested.

  “So now there’s three of them—we can try the merge again so you can see it–”

  “Do it, do it, I don’t want to spend any more time in this mephitic air than I have to.”

  “Really, Grist, we do have air conditioning.”

  “It’s not enough, not around you. Do it, I said.”

  “This is an unauthorized use of a semblant,” said Claire PointOne’s semblant, looking around. “I will shut down and erase.”

  “No, actually, you won’t,” Sykes said. “I’ve removed all the piracy protections.”

  “You can’t be switching me on like this,” the Bulwer semblant said, “without checking with the real Bulwer—this here, it’s–”

  The Grist holographic head turned to the other two. “Oh, shut your logorrheic mouth, he knows what he’s doing.” He turned to look at the real Grist. “Go ahead, old friend.”

  “We’re doing just that, thanks. Sykes?”

  Sykes hit ENTER. The three semblants shimmered—and faded, to instantly reappear on the center disk, together.

  “This is–” Bulwer’s semblant began.

  “—totally objectionable.” Claire’s was saying as ...

  . . . they merged, into one distorted face.

  “Muss them zorn stang at aye-oh-well-dot smith no wesson oil,” the jittering, unsteady image chattered. “Vreedeez vent howl doctor the Pep-Pay, Michael I good king Wenceslas Dharma, how about a little head little lady, point zero approximates nothingness, point one fulfills all, all sum totals times acquisition is love, vanity is love, seven thousand shares of my front teeth too prominent ...”

  The faces had combined to be visually askew, matching the verbal mish-mash.

  “Sykes?” Grist said, staring at it.

  Sykes worked feverishly at the input.

  The face looked like a cubistic painting, to Grist. Maybe two Picassos superimposed. “I am the Not one,” it said, “who used to be ten thousand barrels a day, crude can be divided more times than that nigger Washington Carver’s fucking peanuts to you mother please don’t touch me there with that metal thing it hurts why does Dad have to die just when I’m not in the mood to be touched today, Hank, I’m just not a bird up the ass of my seventh stick this morning like a burning bush of gynecological dimensions–”

  “Sykes?”

  Sykes shook his head, hit a power button. The holograph switched off, the voice ceased.

  “They’re fighting it,” Sykes said, taking off the glasses. There were sweat rings around his eyes.

  “Then fight back. I insist you make it work—and soon. I need it soon. I suspect the board is planning on moving against me—I need to know.”

  “It’ll take time to control it—if it can be done at all–”

  “Oh you’ll control it, Sykes. You must keep it growing—but with careful control.” Grist’s voice had become soft. Almost like a father whispering a warning to a noisy child in church. “You’ll consolidate them and you’ll control what you consolidate and you will make no excuses. I am sick of your excuses. Do you understand me, Sykes? And if you fail me, I will simply take away everything you have. Everything. Your money and your Cassandra. I’ll let you ponder that for a while. And then I’ll have you picked up and I’ll have your arms and legs surgically removed and leave you on the sidewalk on skid row. Naked. Just picture that! What would they do with you? It’s tempting to do it anyway.”

  Grist had Sykes’ attention, for once. The tech prodigy gaped at him. “That’s ... too baroque to ever ... to ever actually ...” He stammered. “I mean, really, such a ... a travesty couldn’t ... You could never ...”

  “What would stop me? The police? I own them.” An exaggeration. A hyperbole. But he did have a lot of influence. And Slakon did own certain segments of the police. “My own security forces are enough to take over the city of Los Angeles. Two hours notice and I can call in enough security to overwhelm the California National Guard. We didn’t just buy Blackwater—we expanded it exponentially, Sykes. I can do exactly as I said and never be prosecuted for it. Your rewards for success, on the other hand, will also be great. Just do it. And get control of the thing—it’s been leaving trails
. They know we’re prowling through their systems. And just remember ... a quick hour with the surgeons and–”

  There was a faint buzzing at Grist’s ear. Targer on three. He accepted the call, turning his back on Sykes.

  “What is it, Targer?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. Candle’s slipped past Halido.”

  “We should have had more people on him.”

  “You didn’t want to use the in-house pros. But Halido’s usually reliable. ”

  “Seems Candle’s better. Do something about it, Targer.”

  “Targer’s on it, sir. As it’s you, I’m authorized to tell you that I’m only his semblant, but I can assure you, he’s–”

  “Oh, shut the fuck up.”

  Grist cut the connection and stalked out of the room. “Fight back, Sykes. Get it done.”

  Grist slammed the door shut behind him.

  The night wind was damp, but it wasn’t quite raining. Candle was walking through the polymorphous cooking smells, the multicolored crowds of Borderbust, in southeast L.A. First and second generation immigrants from around the world, many of them refugees from cities flooded or desiccated by global warming. The crowd elbowing, pushing thick on the sidewalk; in the street dull colored, soft-line cars, mostly electric, a few ethanol exuding their own “cooking” smells—not many after the big ethanol bust of 2016. A swarm of pert little electric cars darting past a few rusty, stubborn oversized, technically illegal gas-burners; a couple of the pricier hydrogen humvees bulked over the rest.

  Borderbust had a rep for providing sanctuary for illegal immigrants in line for amnesty; for being densely polyglot, the melting pot of melting pots, but it seemed to Candle that each foreign culture here had tried to keep its own character; that Chinese still grouped near Chinese, Koreans near Koreans, Mexicans near Mexicans, Filipinos with Filipinos, Albanians with Albanians, Pakistanis with Pakistanis, Armenians with Armenians, Laotians with Laotians. But the melding was there, too; a Mexican/Chinese restaurant, and there the Calcutta and North African Digital Movie Store; a small place since most of its business was online. There was plenty of genetic crossbreeding: there were faces, especially the young on the crowded street, that seemed a sweetly indefinable genetic meld. To Candle, the African-Asian girls were the prettiest combination.