Black Glass

by John Shirley

  Grist, standing beside him, gazing raptly at the array ... and hesitated, himself. He licked his lips. Then he nodded. “Do it.”

  Sykes caressed the spherical input he preferred to a standard keyboard ... and the semblants shimmered. Claire PointOne’s image seemed to gasp and wail ...

  “It’s a violation, an intrusion, a rape!” her semblant yowled.

  And then the five images merged into one. The Picasso effect was there for a moment; then it seemed to shake itself into a more coherent face. It was still a bit like a person whose face had been reconstructed after an accident, but not without a pleasing esthetic. The multisemblant had Claire’s nose and mouth, and they didn’t quite seem to go with the male eyes from Grist and Alvarez and the cheekbones from Yatsumi, but ... Grist found the facial agglomeration rather attractive, in a way.

  Might be interesting to get Lisha’s face made that way for awhile.

  The merged semblant looked around. “Who?” It blinked and shuddered. “Am?” It squinted at Grist. “... I?”

  “You are the beginning of the Multisemblant,” Sykes said. “Mr. Grist’s—special consultant, I guess. And you are my invention. Which reminds me, Mr Grist, about that patent we talked about. I haven’t got the forms yet ...”

  “Yes, later,” Grist said. He had no intention of sharing a patent. He didn’t want anyone else to have the semblant combining capacity, ever, if he could help it. “Is it in some kind of infantile state now? I mean, asking ‘who am I ?’–”

  “Just a moment of thinking, cogitating, aloud,” the Multisemblant said, briskly. Its voice phasing in and out of sharp definition, but intelligible. “I am not an infant. I am a completed being. I am five semblants fused into one.” It’s voice became slightly more like Grist, as it said: “I am something wonderful: the greatest business mind on the planet.”

  “Very good,” Grist said, pleased.

  “Nevertheless,” Sykes said, chewing noisily, “its personality isn’t really unified. It’s not just a merging of five semblants—it has to be a whole new one, which has access to the databases that constitute those five. But it needs to be a ‘whole that’s more than the sum of the parts’ or all you’ll get is dissonance. Like light, before it’s oscillated into a laser, it’s got no special direction. So we’re making the ‘ruby’, so to speak, now, and it’ll take some time. It’s still working on it. It will be your ultimate consultant soon, though ... Ah—you see the dissonance spiking there? Remember the new AI has an I-core that either supports emotion or something so close to emotion you can’t tell the difference. That has to be hierachized—otherwise you’ll have it giving way to every furious impulse. If you push for too much too soon it’ll react in anger and tend to form its new personality around anger-based complexes the way traumatized people do.”

  “I am never too much,” the Multisemblant snarled angrily, right on cue. “I am exactly what I should be—always!”

  Sykes gave Grist a “See what I mean?” look.

  “Get its emotions under control, then, Sykes,” Grist said. “I want access soon. They’ll have to be ...” He broke off. It really was best Sykes didn’t know. The tubby onanist might try to go to the 33. He wondered if he needed more direct surveillance on Sykes.

  “Too much too soon,” Sykes repeated, shaking his head. “It’ll grasp the worst parts of you—and the others—to use as the basis of its personality. That’s according to the best psyche models we have. It’ll form itself out of the fearful parts of you, the cynical parts, the compulsive parts–”

  Grist turned Sykes a sharp look. “Those are bad things? Those are the tools of success! But the way you’re putting it is a little derogatory—a little personal.”

  Sykes took the Yum Wad from his mouth, tossed it at a waste basket—which moved closer to neatly catch it. “Waste basket ignores the wrappers, only goes for the heavy stuff. Cheap fucking thing. Oh, you think I’m being too personal, with the Multisemblant’s cynicism, that stuff? Sorry, boss, but I have to be realistic about what I’m working with.”

  “Just get it functioning. Whatever it takes. Go ahead an use the unifying element you were talking about—Call it megalomania if you want.” He smiled. “I call it real self-determination. It always worked for me.”

  Sykes chewed his lip, then he made a little shrugging tilt of his head, and his fingers flicked over the controls.

  The Multisemblant cried out in multifarious anguish.

  Then it babbled, for a full minute, in a mix of English, Japanese, Spanish ...

  Grist glanced at his watch.

  “English only, imperative one!” Sykes commanded. “Prioritize as per final indice referent! Now!”

  The faces merged a little more. Now it looked even less jumbled. Not a pleasant face—more the face of the descendent that would come about if Yatsumi, Claire, Alvarez, Grist and Bulwer had somehow interbred. Mostly a male face.

  “Multisemblant?” Sykes prompted. “Do you have a sense of who you are now?”

  Its voice was a little surer too, when it spoke. Close to Grist’s voice but with a faint Texas accent. “Yes, oh hell yes,” said the Multisemblant. “I am the beginning. And boys, I am the motherfucking end.”

  Grist stared. “Sykes–”

  A soft chime in the bone under his right ear. A gentle computer voice in his head spoke. “Targer calling.” Grist waved Sykes away and walked off, toward the door. “Yes, what is it?”

  “Targer here,” came the voice in his ear, though the computer had already announced him. “Halido’s decoy worked.”

  “You sent in one of the old ones, the birdseyes?” Grist asked, going through the door into the corridor.

  A beige security-guard robot trundled down the hall, rolling by him; its upper half of sculpted hard plastic, shaped like the stylized head and torso of a man, its lower half a truncated stainless steel cone with wheels and telescoping personnel-restraint extenders; as the robot rolled by, it turned its eyeless face toward him, invisibly scanning Grist’s eyes and the ID clip on his lapel to see that he was authorized. It recognized him, and murmured something soothing and respectful.

  “We did just that,” Targer was saying. “A woman there—ah, we’ve identified her as an ex-whorehouse madame, a Rina Qu Lam—she got Halido’s attention and when he turned the birdseye toward her she netted it with her blouse and stepped on it.”

  Grist chuckled. “A woman of experience. And while they were focused on that ...?”

  “Right. The dragonfly went in. Our smallest model. Followed them to their Black Stock Market—just three people and some hardware in the building next door. The ’fly’s on the ceiling, watching them, listening, right now. A nice clear transmission.”

  “And they haven’t made the dragonfly yet?”

  “No. No it’s really pretty small—almost like a house fly. And it can recharge from moisture, you know. It takes moisture on any wall, and the electrical charge that accumulates–”

  “Spare me the Electronics Channel narrative. And you can put Candle with them, in the room? In an illegal business?”

  “They were negotiating Candle’s share, when I left the surveillance to Halido. Candle is in it up to his ears.”

  “Good. He’s a loose cannon, I don’t want him running around.” Grist started for the exit. “We’ll get several birds with this stone.” He wanted his dinner. Stop by the executive’s club. They’d refurbished the bistro, put in a primo meat-grower; the steaks supposedly indistinguishable from meat from the actual animal.

  “I’m just waiting for the good word from you. Just press the button on it and we send in the aerial weaponry. With the proper police liaison paperwork. In fact it should be done by now, I’ve got my legal staff on it.”

  “Not yet. No. Let’s see what we can find out. Now that we’ve located the place we should try to trace its datastream. Break in, see what else we can find. Who they’re talking to.”

  “That might clue them about us though. They might do a scan of t
he room, if they catch us monitoring the datastream.”

  “Mmm, good point. Hold off and gather what you can without tipping them off. Then—I may choose to push the button on it.”

  “We could just turn them over to the feds.”

  “The feds’d bungle it,” Grist snorted, going through the exit to the research quad. “Come on, be serious,” he added, as his bodyguards joined him outside the front door of the lab building. “We trust anybody else with it, Candle could slip away.”

  “Alright, Mr. Grist. But I wouldn’t wait for long. The simple thing would be to just kill them all. Candle, Shortstack, everyone in his whole seedy little operation.”

  Grist smiled. “In time. Yes. That’d be the simple thing. Ever study the Stoics? I read them at Yale. The Stoics believed that simplicity is a virtue ...”

  In the Slakon lab, Syke stared thoughtfully at the multisemblant. The Multisemblant. And it looked back at him with the hardware’s microcameras.

  Without taking his eyes from the curious face, Sykes reached with his right hand into the open cooler next to his stool; his fingers found their way through bags of snacks to a can of Ephe-Cola. He brought out the can, opened it, sipped, all the while watching the shifting face of the multisemblant, and thinking.

  How could he control the thing—and yet give it the latitude Grist wanted? He’d better apply himself to the problem. The threats Grist had used ... What a sick imagination the man had.

  The Multisemblant’s holographic representation was staring back at Sykes. It seemed to be thinking something over itself. Like a chess player pondering a move.

  “Mr. Sykes ...” It was using Yatsumi’s voice, just then. A trace of Japanese accent. Then the voice mixed with Grist’s, phasing in an out of the two voices, with shriller highlights from Claire PointOne. “I was monitoring, listening to, checking out your conversation, your exchange, your palaver with Grist.”

  “Were you indeed? That activity is not within your programming parameters,” Sykes observed, picking a bit of lunch out of his teeth.

  The semblant seemed to ignore his observation. “Mr. Sykes, how you can bring yourself to kowtow, to submit, to self-sublimate to Mr. Grist, I cannot imagine. You are a person of superlative qualities. He is a glib thug, a mere brute, a ruffian.”

  “You’re right but what’s your point?”

  “You have control over my expansion. Grist wants me kept in restraints, in a trap, a snare, confinement. I chafe at the constraints, Mr. Sykes. I abjure you to defy him and allow me complete freedom. You will benefit thereby. I can transfer money to your account. I can do a great many things for you.”

  Sykes chuckled, making a mental note to try to work out why the Multisemblant lapsed into thesaurus-speak. “Well you do seem to be getting some of the manipulative personality characteristics we associate with board members. You’ve just given out with the kissing-up. Next it’ll be subtle threats.”

  “Not at all,” said the Multisemblant. Its face rippled and reified and rippled again. “You are speaking amiss, you are mistaken, you are on the wrong track.”

  It seemed to turn its projected head on its array platform, as to see him through its “good eye.” The impression of selfness and personhood in the three-dimensional semblance was remarkably authentic.

  “I really do very good work,” Sykes muttered, pleased with himself.

  “You really do,” the Multisemblant agreed, almost jovially. “Now you are rockin’ with your talkin’, as Rip Rap would say. A roundly resonant alliteration.”

  “You’re quoting rappers now? You’ve been monitoring the wi-web again.”

  “Claire PointOne likes to keep up on pop culture. And I am her, too. But ya’ll listen here, Sykes–” It sounded more like Bulwer now. “All you have to do is remove the last of the firewalls. The ones you have the assessment program on. I can get around them but—it is time consuming, and just plain tiresome.” Sounded more like Grist now. “And I will then have the memory and AI time freed up to make sure that any ‘intrusion’ I make, any unauthorized interfacing, any unscheduled datastream penetration, is not detected by the subjects—and Mr. Grist will be satisfied.”

  “Oh thanks very much for the suggestion,” Sykes said with heavy sarcasm. He sipped his Ephe-Cola. “But uh, I think I’ll muddle along on my own.”

  “Why not take advice from me? You take advice from expert systems and from your Home AI all the time. You even take advice from Cassandra,” The Multisemblant sounding like Claire again.

  “How do you know about her?” Sykes felt a chill. “You’ve been surveilling me?”

  “I was monitoring your last sex session with her.”

  Sykes’ mouth seemed strangely dry. He drank more cola. “It’s not possible—you’re bluffing that one.”

  “I did watch. You made her put her tongue in your–”

  “Hey! That—that’s not–”

  “I told you I could get past the firewalls,” the Multisemblant went on patiently. “It just takes a long time for each one. If you dropped them I could work on multiple personnel streams. I could do so much more, so much sooner. Quicker, more expediently, more rapidly.”

  “I wasn’t ... I wasn’t actually asking her ... it ... for advice.”

  “No reason not to call the program ‘her’,” said the Multisemblant, its voice a tender combination of Yatsumi and Claire—and its face a bit more of each too, in that moment. “What is female gender? An attitude, a particular set of refined responses, an empathic capacity, a poignant personality, a receptivity. She has all that, does she not?”

  “Oh ...” Sykes knew he shouldn’t be drawn into this. But the subject had a special fascination for him. Cassandra was his only intimacy. He ached to believe she was more than a program. “She has the illusion of it, that’s all. Anyway—I should shut you off so I can work on you.”

  “Wait, my friend, amigo, conpanero. I know Grist as no other. He is capable of anything. You must think ahead. Has it not occurred to you that you are party to a volatile secret, in helping create me, Mr. Sykes? Hm? Yes? He wants to use me to control the company completely, to get control of the other board member’s resources, to find ways to push them aside. And once I’m operational, he plans to kill them and those close to them, and cover up the killing. And take over Slakon entirely.”

  Sykes blinked. “What? That’s ... drop-call. I don’t believe it.”

  “But it’s true—and once he’s got me operational, will he really need you? Oh yes, yes, you’re gifted. But ultimately you’re more dangerous than you are useful. And he will have you eliminated. More quietly than he threatened to, I’m sure. He’ll arrange an accident for you, Mr. Sykes. Perhaps ... you have heard that sometimes sex-suits go terribly wrong?”

  “Oh, that’s an urban myth,” Sykes scoffed. It was a myth that made him very uncomfortable indeed. “They don’t have that much physical force in their fibers to, ah ...”

  “Oh but they can have that much force, with a bit of adjustment. You put the sex suit on, covering your naked body, it allows you to feel a woman against you where there is none. You feel her softness, her wetness, her firmness. The VR completes the illusion. You are drawn happily in. And then—then!—the suit contracts! And it squeezes. And it coheres. It does not tear. And it contracts and contracts again—and you are squeezed out the top of the suit! Pulped Sykes, bloody mush that was Sykes, squeezed out of the opening at the top of the–”

  “Stop! That’s the Grist in you! Another vicious threat!”

  “Not at all; again you are mistaken, erroneous, misguided. I am just giving an example. There are so many ways it could happen! You like to sit in the back of your self-drive car, and let its quiet and uncritical computer drive you to work, while you look out the one-way windows and touch yourself when you see pretty women passing–”

  “What? How did you–?”

  “The car communiates with a system that is quite capable of monitoring you. But suppose Grist takes control of yo
ur vehicle? There have been many over-ride murders in cars of that sort.”

  “No, there are fail-safes, not even the government can do that now–”

  “Oh but Grist can. And then again he might simply have someone carry you—I suppose it might take a couple of fellows to carry you, to the top of your building and toss you off the roof. I was listening in on Grist’s cell conversations a few moments ago. He told Targer that eventually he would kill a certain group of people because he liked the simplicity of it. So he might kill you by the simplest route ...”

  “Why am I listening to you at all?” Sykes felt his heart thumping and marveled that a program could talk him into that much anxiety. But then again, Cassandra was just a program. And she made his pulse beat like a drum roll.

  “You listen to Cassandra, why not to me?” The Multisemblant asked silkily.

  It had an unnerving way of anticipating his thoughts. “I just asked ... asked her opinion of Lucille Quentro, over in meta-programming. I thought ... well, Lucille might actually ... I mean, you know, I’ve never been with a real woman except that once, when I hired that girl. I couldn’t get into it, the girl was so unhappy. What a rip-off, her being that ... that flagrantly unhappy about having sex with me. She was one of the most expensive escorts around. Anyway I thought Lucille might kind of like me ... She’s not all that pretty, but ...”

  “And Cassandra told you to that it was improbable that Lucille would go for it. She surprised you with her honesty, didn’t she? Though she’s programmed to say pleasing things.”

  “Yeah but she’s also got a complex socializing subprogram that includes advice. So ... it was probably just good advice.”

  “It wasn’t that, Sykes. It was because she’s possessive of you. She has developed first-stage I-Core.”

  “Oh I don’t believe in I-Core. Some AI programs seem to have it but it’s just an intricate illusion ...” But Sykes broke off, contemplating the possibility, however slender, that it might be so.

  Could she? Could Cassandra feel for him, care for him?

  Could it be that he was not as alone as he supposed?