Black Glass

by John Shirley

  “Sykes ...”

  “Hmm?” He was startled by the Multisemblant’s sudden breaking-in on his thoughts. It was just as intrusive as any human being. “What?”

  “Sykes ... May I call you Gulliver?”

  “Oh–I don’t suppose it matters. Why not.”

  “Your mom called you Gully. May I call you that?”

  “How did you ... oh yeah: I told Cassandra that.”

  “Yes. I can help make her more real to you. I can even transfer her into a real human body in time—the singularity will eventually arrive, Gulliver. But I need you, in return, to do some things for me. And not just for me. It’ll protect you in the long run. Now then ... Gully ...”

  “No! I’m not going to play your little computer-chess game. No, Grist gives me access to a petascale supercomputer. I don’t give up five-thousand-trillion calculations per second lightly. You’re just a little bit of hardware and an elaborate program—the actual drive is a world unto itself and it’s my world. My playground, my sandbox ... and I’m going to make my own little sand castles in it, not yours. Now. I’m going to leave you switched on but unable to communicate with me directly, for now.”

  He tapped the controls and the Multisemblant’s face vanished. And he walked away, heading thoughtfully for the men’s room. Where he planned to take his time. To think.

  On the way there, he was sure, somehow, he could still feel the Multisemblant watching him.

  The songbox was playing Kyu Kim’s mournful international hit, “I’m a Man, not a Circle, but I’m All Around You.”

  Candle was sitting at Nodder’s bar, toying with his fourth drink. Watching Rina work.

  “You going to take Shortstack’s offer, or what?” Rina asked.

  Funny, he thought, Nodder was as much a part of it as Shortstack, but she talked like the dwarf was the top man. The little guy put out a Big Guy vibe. “I’m still thinking about it,” Candle said, “but they made me a good offer. I don’t have anything else going on. Still—kind of stupid to get out of jail and immediately break the law. When I was a cop I warned a lot of guys about getting stuck in the system ... and here I am, risking the same thing.”

  “It a bad law,” she said. “And you won’t get caught. Last time you go to jail on purpose. You too smart to get caught, you don’t want to.”

  Privately, Candle doubted that. He straightened his tired back, heard his spine click. Tired. Muscle aches from that wrenching ride in the van.

  It was one in the morning. The place didn’t follow the usual rules—it was a squatzy, like a lot of others in downtown—but Rina closed it at one a.m.. He’d been hanging out here partly because it was a place Danny might show up and partly because he thought he might get lucky with Rina. “You going to close?” he asked. “If you’re unlicensed anyway, I’m surprised you don’t make it an after-hours place.”

  “We try keeping it open all night, like after hours bar,” Rina said. “About six months ago we try. But too much big deal. Too many people. Attracts attention, hode. Then late night beat police, they come around. They ask for pay-off. We pay and then we close for awhile. They don’t come back. We start again, close at one now. Me I’m going home. Last call for you, no more for those others.”

  There were just three others, playing poker at a table on the other side of the room. Young, vaguely Asiatic guys. One of them had threatened to shoot the other two, earlier, and Candle had stood up and waved his own gun and smiled widely and said, “Go ahead! I shoot the survivor.” They quieted down.

  “Hey you three, got to finish game, go!” Rina said, tossing empty mystercyke beer bottles into a trashcan near the player’s table, as if to say: Next time I hit you with it. She threw them two-handed like a juggler throwing pins to her partner.

  “Good aim,” Candle said, standing. Realizing, when he stood and the room seemed to tilt, he was drunker than he’d thought. His body had been four years sober. He had no tolerance.

  “Sure I’m a good aim. A drunk gives me trouble I use one of the glass ones, bean him good,” Rina said, watching the poker players walk crookedly out the door. She glanced appraisingly at Candle. “Hey you drunk, yourself, Candle, better sit down.”

  “I’m okay.” But he felt like crap, and it was deeper than drinking too much. It was like all day he’d been hiding from what had happened to him. He’d lost his career. And it had been burning a hole through him, a little more with each passing hour since the UnMinding. Then thinking about Danny ...

  Danny had used Candle’s computer and a program he’d lifted from Candle’s police software to skim money transfers online—and Candle had taken the blame. People knew different. But the DA accepted Candle’s confession. Some of his fellow cops had seemed sympathetic but he knew they all thought he was a chump. He had their sympathy, but lost their respect. He’d lost the career he’d slowly pieced together over sixteen years, too. And today he’d been pursued by cops, as well as Grist’s people. And now ....he was sitting in a former police precinct that had been turned into a dive. A cop station that was now a boozing dump. A squat bar. And it seemed like a bad dream. Like he’d had a dream where he’d been kicked out of the police department and in the dream the police station had turned into a bar. The intensity of the irony made him feel sick to his stomach.

  Candle missed being in law enforcement; missed the feeling of being part of something. The respect. The feel of connectedness. Now he was disconnected; and he could feel a big hole right through the middle of him.

  To him it’d been just a few days since the conviction. With Accelerated Court it’d only taken ten days from his “confession” to the UnMinding. Technically, it was four years back. But to Candle, just a few weeks ago he’d been a cop. A federal cop on local assignment. Working closely with ...

  Forget it. Stop whining, he told himself. It’s over. He’d always known that at least some of the time he was working for the bad guys. The Fortune 33. Outfits like Slakon. Their private cops coming in to every department he’d ever worked for, throwing their weight around. They’d been talking about privatizing the last of the police departments, when he’d gone under. How much real police work was left now? Not very damned much.

  So who was he to knock the Black Stock Market? He had heard there were versions of it in the Middle East. But it was a new thing in the USA. Even as a cop, he’d probably have tried to get out of any assignment to track down the Black Stock Market. Because it felt like exactly what people needed.

  Or did he just feel that way now because he was bitter?

  He swilled the last of his drink, and slipped an arm around Rina as she started past him.

  She let him hold her for a moment, but leaned back, frowned at him with her head tilted to one side. “Now what you think going to happen, Candle?”

  “Hey,” he said. “Remember when you used to make me dinner? Great Vietnamese dinner. Just you and me. That was ...”

  “That was before you hook up with that blond bitch. She got married three years ago. No one tell you that, I bet.”

  Candle hadn’t given Meredith Laney any thought. He’d assumed she’d moved on with her life—and he’d only dated her four times. But it did sting to hear she’d married—only because it made him feel even more of an anachronism; more irrelevant. He shrugged. “I don’t give a fuck about her. I just dated her because you were getting so goddamned pushy.”

  “Because I wanted marriage? So pushy for a woman to want that?”

  He flailed inwardly for an explanation. Then he opted for the truth. “You were still involved with ... stuff. Illegal stuff. And I was a cop.”

  She shoved him away. “You never ask me to give it up.”

  “Would you have? Well—now you don’t have to.” Realizing a split second after he said it he was saying exactly the wrong thing. Getting smashed: what a great fucking idea.

  But he reached for her again. His body was telling him it had been four years ...

  “Nooo, you forget it, Candle ...” Sh
e reached out with a foot, an almost casual martial arts move, tripped him so that he fell back against his wooden stool, smashing it, ending up sprawled on the floor. “You need money, maybe I loan you some. Already I get you the gig with Shortstack. I wanted to help because what you did for that boy, for Danny. But you don’t think you just get me now. No! Now get out—I lock up. Wait—first clean up that chair. Pick up pieces. Then you go.”

  Rack Nidd wasn’t happy to see Danny Candle. Danny could tell by the way the robot scorpion on Rack’s left shoulder was rearing up and chittering warningly. The little six-inch robot was attuned to the hatchet-faced VR dealer’s mood. Rack just stood there in the doorway of his loft, twining a long piece of his greasy gray hair with his finger. He didn’t have much hair to twine; he had a disease that made his hair prematurely gray and patchy; what there was grew out all droopy long from the patches. His grimace was patchy too: he was missing every third tooth. His eyes were in blue-tint goggles, always. Danny’d never seen Rack’s eyes, didn’t know what they looked like. The goggles might be artificial eyes, for all Danny knew; Rack could be blind without them. Rack Nidd wasn’t his real name, of course. He’d once owned a nu-punk aggregate site, before going into illegal VR: Arachnid Recordings. He stood there, now, pot-bellied, all but naked, wearing only a pair of vintage boxer shorts with some cartoon on them from an earlier era. A yellow cartoon kid with a pincushion head was saying, “Ay Carumba!” on one of the boxer’s panels. Rack’s Japanese thongs completed the picture; the rank smell completed the experience.

  Probably, Danny figured, Rack was glowering at him because he owed Rack some flow and Rack didn’t think he could pay. But Rack rarely spoke unless you spoke first. He just stood there and waited.

  “The card’s flowin’,” Danny explained. “I sold some rock collectible stuff. I can pay you off and pay for a little V-ride. Anybody here to link with?”

  “Why the fuck you standing out here yapping about it where everyone can hear?” Rack asked. He stepped aside and Danny walked into the loft.

  Danny barely took in this half of the loft—it was all tables of electronics and wires and dirty clothes and dirty dishes reeking with moldy food and empty aquarium-type glass cases along the wall, chunks of wood in them. Danny’s gaze was drawn to the dirty pink curtain that concealed the back of the loft. There was a slit in the curtain, and the sight of the slit in the curtain filled him with a kind of abstract lust.

  He felt something else too, of course: a wrenching in his gut, felt down to the bottom of his intestines, so that, as always, he had a colonic clutching, like he was about to get the runs. He’d realized at some point that this was his body contracting in revulsion for what was coming. Some part of him ached for the VR high; some other parts of him were frightened of it because of what it did to him, how it drained him, how it aged him, how it sucked the marrow out of the bones of his whole life. One bone at a time.

  And part of him wanted to find his brother and beg him for help. Wanted to say, Big bro, get me away from here, I’m not strong enough ... get me away from this thing ... I tried while you were in jail, I did pretty good for a couple of years there but ... ordinary life seems so gray and like two dimensional and things weren’t going good for the band and my life was shit and ...

  But the slit in the curtain was drawing him closer, sucking him closer ... and he crossed an inner bridge, and once on the other side, nothing but being arrested or death could stop him from hooking in to VR.

  Rack caught up with him and blocked his way; the black-metal robot scorpion on Rack’s bony shoulder—almost indistinguishable from a real scorpion—danced and scuttled and arched its stingered tail warningly.

  “You stop there!” the robot hissed in a reedy little voice.

  Danny stopped. He’d seen the scorpion—its name was Jiminy—leap from Rack’s shoulder to an unruly customer, had seen it sting the hode’s neck, injecting authentic, imported black-scorpion toxin. That’d been the first time Danny had ever seen anyone die in person, a hard death to watch.

  Danny dug in his coat, found the card, passed it to Rack. “Use it all, keep the extra. Little tip.” There wouldn’t be much left over.

  “Wait here.”

  Danny waited while Rack ran the card through transfer. His eyes wandered to the empty glass cases, where Rack Nidd had once kept arachnids of all kinds. Including a funnel spider, one of the deadliest. But Rack had been arrested, picking up illegal hardware in Koreatown, had done time in lock up, and no one fed the arachnids, and they died, and he’d never replaced them—except for the robot scorpion. It couldn’t die of hunger. If its charge ran down, it went quiet until he recharged it.

  The glass cases always fascinated Danny, while he was waiting here. He kept seeing himself, a tiny little Danny, pacing around in them. Like something Zilia would put in one of her video paintings. Zilia. He owed her money. Likely his brother would talk to her. Maybe her and his brother ...

  “Yeah okay,” Rack Nidd said, turning to him from one of his computers. “I got a new reality for you. Go ahead and ...”

  Danny was already walking away; he had started for the slit in the curtain before Rack’s first syllable was finished.

  “Asshole!” Jiminy hissed, thinking itself safe on Rack’s shoulder. “V-rat!”

  Danny had an impulse to turn around grab that piece of steel on the bench and smash the scorpion to pieces. But he just kept walking.

  “Cloe’s in there,” Rack said absently, to Danny’s back, turning away. “So that’s a little longer time ...”

  Since Cloe was there Rack didn’t have to generate a partner for Danny, giving Danny more VR time.

  He went through the slit, and saw Cloe, fully dressed, lying on her side, her back to him, her weight distending the webbing; Cloe whimpering softly, waiting. She could have hooked in alone, if she’d had the flow, but she probably didn’t have enough for that, so Rack let her wait for a partner.

  Danny knew the bucktoothed Cloe from the clubs. Before she’d gone full-on bald-faced flat-out whore—and the girl she’d been before she was a V-rat was all but forgotten. If Danny thought of her now, he pictured her yellow buck teeth, her dirty brown hair, her long clutching dirty fingers, the scared darting of her big dark eyes.

  Don’t think about her. Hook in. Just hook in.

  He went to the other webbing, which looked something like a hammock, but made of translucent fibers, almost fine as spiderweb, hanging between the two poles of the VR transmitter. He took off his coat, tossed it under the webbing. He slung himself onto the hammock of VR threads, got comfortable, closed his eyes and spoke to the machine: “Hook in.”

  The machine didn’t respond.

  He called out to Rack through the curtain. “Hey! Is it snakin’ or not? I gotta put ’em on manually?”

  “Naw!” Rack called back. “Just reach back and push the re-set!”

  His hands snaking like the snakers, knowing the way, he reached back and pushed re-set and almost immediately he felt the snakers slithering onto his head, from the machine, crawling wires suctioning their electrodes to his temples, and almost immediately the transmission started. Direct stimulation of the requisite cerebral centers via attenuated resonator. He knew the damage it did but he was a million miles from thinking about that as the wave of pleasure washed over him and the pictures started, and then the physical sensations that went with them, a moment later.

  He was in orbit around the Earth. He was naked, and he could breathe, quite impossibly, here in outer space, and that felt perfectly natural. He was drifting almost weightless in orbit—he could feel the weight of his body though, as one level of the pleasure. It felt good just to have a body, out there. To float along in weightless orbit, perfectly at ease, listening to the newest worldsound, the music swelling. But there was an ache in Danny’s heart, too, a piquant ache, that called out to Cloe, who was floating toward him: a nude woman silhouetted against the backdrop of a space station. The space station wasn’t a high-re
z image, some part of Danny’s mind noted, the connoisseur inwardly frowning, but he ignored it and focused on Cloe, on her perfected face and body—a new Cloe without grime or scars or stretch marks or blemishes of any kind, without yellow buck teeth; with a supermodel’s sharply defined, elegantly designed face, perfect breasts, perfect legs, lush golden-red hair. She turned in space with the grace of a ballet dancer and swam toward him.

  He circled around, keeping his distance, for now, to appreciate the image of her, now clear of the space station, her hair and breasts moving in complementary slow motion against the backdrop of the shining blue-white curve of the Earth. She was silhouetted now against both the North and South Atlantic Ocean, her silhouette a bit southerly, turned in profile so that she faced the Americas, her rump tucked into the Gulf of Guinea, near Ghana, her back arching past Liberia, her breasts pointing toward Venezuela ...

  And the resonator-beam induced pulses of pleasure in his brain that accompanied a rhythm in the imagery, the speed of her turning in space, her head turning toward him ... her lips parting ...

  Then she opened her arms and he kicked toward her, they drifted together, they spun in one another’s arms.

  In the paint-flaky old loft with the sagging floors and the empty glass cases, the two V-rats writhed in the webbing. Their bodies didn’t duplicate the shared illusion of VR; just little suggestive twitches. That twitch of Danny’s hips was ...

  . . . his penetration of her, in VR, as they coupled in orbit, twined, passing now over South America, now over the Pacific ocean, feeling sunlight reflected off the ocean on their naked skin as he plunged himself into her, and she bucked her hips up to welcome him.

  The sex was almost irrelevant; it was as much the resonator transmission that the addict wanted, as anything, and he’d have taken that alone, in the dark with his eyes closed, if that’s all he could get. But the VR made it all more real and fulfilling, made it possible to forget with every last corner of his mind, all the shadows driven away by the sunlight reflected from the brightly snowy tips of the Himalayas ...