Black Glass

by John Shirley

  Danny was happy to be alive, seeing only what was good, feeling only good feelings.

  Until tomorrow, the song goes. But that’s just some other time. I’m waiting for my man ...

  Raining again in the warehouse district. Candle was half way to sober, thinking maybe Zilia would let him in because of the rain. Not that he didn’t have alternatives. He had Nodder’s phone number, he could get Nodder or Shortstack to put him up. He wanted time away from those two, though; time to think.

  He was too tired, too emotionally drained, too headachey, to look for Danny any more today. He had an advance; he could go to a motel. But then he’d be on the motel’s computer and that’d put him on the grid, and that might trigger some search spider, cue Grist where he was. He needed to buy a good, solid, fake identity. He knew people he could see about that.

  Tomorrow or the next day.

  So Candle rang Zilia’s doorbuzzer.

  “Oh no,” she said, surprising him by coming almost immediately to the window. “Great. You again. The guy with no money and no clue.”

  But she buzzed him in. He dripped a trail of rainwater up the stairs to her loft apartment. The upstairs door was slightly ajar. He went in, closing the door behind him, found Zilia standing at her workstation, barefoot in a clinging shift. The workstation was set high enough off the floor that she could work standing up. Some kind of painter’s tradition? Her fingers were tracing a touch-active screen. An overlay of green followed her index finger around the face of a furiously sobbing little girl ...

  She tapped a keyboard and the picture began to move, the little girl blurring as she turned, the child’s image on the screen seeming to look past Zilia right at Candle as he stood dripping by the workstation.

  “Dumbass, you’re getting water on the floor,” Zilia said, without looking up from her work.

  “Wondering if I could borrow your sofa. Just tonight. I’m kind of avoiding being on the grid right now and I’m tired and a little drunk and–”

  “Just stop dripping. Go to that armoire in the back, there’s a bathrobe you can put on. Strip off the outer clothes. And get no ideas.”

  “Ideas? No ma’am, not me,” Candle said. He crossed to the armoire stripped off his shirt and pants. “Any news on Danny?” he called.

  “I was gonna ask you that,” she said. “But there might be something soon ...”

  He changed to the terrycloth bathrobe, over his underwear, borrowed some too-small flip-flops, tied up the bathrobe and returned to sit, half stretched out on the sagging dull-green sofa. She’d cleaned up the Chinese food cartons and had set up a small twenty-year-old plasma TV on a coffee table—the table was actually an old wooden door, the doorknob still attached, now pointing at the ceiling; the door lying flat on cinder blocks. He looked around more closely at the wall art. Her own work and prints by a collection of artists selected with some tantalizingly obscure unifying principle. Candle recognized some of the artists from the online art history class his lama had talked him into: late nineteenth-century absinthe-addled etchings, Italian futurists, some surrealists—Max Ernst, Duchamp—and modernists. David Hockney ... and the uncategorizable: Robert Williams and Paul Mavrides. He considered trying to impress her by discussing the artists, and decided it wouldn’t work.

  “You can put the TV on,” she said, her fingers tapping. Images flowed from the tapping, as if they were projected right from the tips of her fingers. “I’ve been listening to news while I’m doing this piece, getting ideas from it. I’ve got a grant and a deadline. Have to get this done.”

  “TV!” he said, leaning toward it. And waited for it to turn itself on.

  It didn’t respond. She laughed. “You have to turn that one on with a remote.”

  He found the remote, switched on the news, which was the very last thing he wanted to watch. His head was throbbing. He rubbed his temples with his fingers. The news channel was showing pictures of the latest hurricane devastation. Describing another attempt at “hurricane diffusal” with microwave beams from space, a process which sometimes seemed to make them worse, not weaker; the report segued to “other orbital observations from Olly” which referred to an investigation into the deaths of sixty-two space tourists killed when a satellite struck the Virgin Airways Public Space Station.

  “They’re still investigating that?” Candle asked. “They were investigating that four years ago.”

  “Yeah,” she laughed. “They’re finally somehow coming to the conclusion that it’s not the fault of any major corporation and everyone is, like, so fucking surprised.” Virgin had been absorbed, years before, into one of the Fortune 33.

  In other orbital news, the ChiDePlex Microwave Energy Beam ... The beam’s energy was gathered by enormous solar panels floating in an outer orbit, to be sent to a mountaintop receiving station and turned into electrical power. It seemed that the power had again fried a slightly-lost airliner, cooking a number of the passengers in their seats. An engineer speculated that “frequency disturbances” from the power-beam, which was responsible for most of the energy used in the Chicago-Detroit Complex, were interfering with the guidance systems of the robot airliner pilots, so they tended to wander into the beam, which then ...

  Candle grimaced, imagining the scene on the plane.

  “So besides finding Danny—what are you going to do now?” she asked.

  “I’ve got a job in ... security.” That was another thing he didn’t want to think about right now. Did not want to think about what a mistake he was probably making, working with Nodder and Shortstack.

  Now the news had shifted to a health pundit warning about “ad-stress malaise”, the purported sickness caused by being bombarded by too much advertising, especially amongst people who couldn’t afford skull-phones without eye-projection advertising. You had to pay extra for commercial-free implanted phones. Between ads generated on nearly every public surface and those generated by your own phone, the pundit said, you felt over-amped, confused, numb. The Advertising Council insisted that the malaise was not genuine ... “I get sick to my stomach every time I go in a fucking mall for more than twenty minutes,” Zilia said. “And I haven’t even got a skull fone. Every wall, the floors in a lot of places, the ceiling, even the fucking el-banisters crawling with ads. I think I’ll put my girl here into a mall, holding her stomach like she’s feeling sick ...”

  Back after this word from Slakon. An ad for Slakon pharmaceuticals came on: A pretty middle-aged woman walking her Turtle Dog. It panted and snarfed; its shell was decorated in tasteful pastels. She chuckled at the dog and looked up at the sky, stretching happily. Then smiled at the camera. “My dog’s customized–” She laughed softly. “—and so are my prescriptions. Slakon Customized Medication works for me, it’ll work for you. Painless implants, always customized to your blood chemistry, your age, your needs. Always—your needs.” The middle-aged actress shook her head, grateful and amazed. “Just think—every single prescription unique ...”

  A chime sounded and a window formed on Zilia’s work screen. “Found some botsearch!” said a small, sexless voice from the computer.

  “That’s my botsearch on Danny,” she said. She touched the little window and it unscrolled its findings. “Says there’s chatter about him doing a show at the Black Glass club. This weekend ... I’ll print it out ...”

  “I know the place,” Candle said. “The Black Glass. He must know I’ll find him there. He probably figures he can ditch me after the show—or maybe he’s got a phishline ready.”

  “Oh he’s got a lie ready, alright. That’s as reliable as death and taxes.”

  She’d gone back to video painting, finding the image of the woman with the turtle dog on a Slakon Pharms website, copying it, introducing it into her image, morphing the little girl’s image so she changed, became the older woman walking her turtle dog, changing it so the woman’s mouth endlessly vomited prescription pills; the woman’s eyes shedding pill tears. “He’s gonna pay me the money he owes me, the littl
e troll. What you going to do when you find him?”

  “I don’t know,” Candle said sleepily. “It’s not like he’ll agree to go into rehab. But I’ve got to try.”

  “I hope you can go to sleep with me working because that’s gonna go on for awhile.”

  “Sure, I’m fine. Half an hour or so, I’ll zone out no matter what.”

  Images flooded across her screen sucked from a thousand sources in the Mesh. “You know ...” She murmured. “All our media’s supposed to be, like, a window for us. Windows, they called it, the system that broke it out for everyone. But there’s so much—and it has so little content that matters ... and we get so drawn into it ... it’s like the window’s gone dark. Transmarginal Inhibition, Pavlov called it. Like if you put too many colors together it makes black ...”

  Black glass, he thought, watching her silhouette against the light from her several screens. Admiring the muscular shape of her thighs. Something subtle in her body language told him she knew he was looking at her, and admiring her. She didn’t seem to mind. Back when she was with Danny she’d known that Rick Candle was attracted to her. They both knew, and never spoke of it. Candle was drawn to her intelligence, her mordant honesty; her capacity for wrapping idealism in wry cynicism. Her face mesmerized him—and her physical energy. He thought she was drawn to him, too. But neither one of them had been likely to do anything about it; he’d never make a move on Danny’s girlfriend, though her relationship with Danny had been shaky. Not that Danny Candle wasn’t catnip to women, when he had it together.

  But now ... Now, Candle mused, she and Danny were through.

  Forget it, he told himself. She probably thinks you’re a loser.

  “I don’t really understand how you ended up doing time for him,” she said, tilting her head to consider her work. “The whole story with you and Danny and Slakon and the ... the conviction. It’s like there’s some parts left out of the picture ...”

  “There’s parts of it I don’t understand myself. Things I don’t think he ever told me.” He stretched out on the sofa and closed his eyes. Doubted it would do any good to pretend he was going to sleep so he wouldn’t have to talk about it. “Well ... It started with addiction. So many fucking messes do. Danny’s addiction. I don’t need to tell you.”

  “No you don’t. But how’d his wi-high get you in jail? And after you went down ...” She shook her head. “We argued whenever we talked about it. So it was just easier not to talk about it.”

  “He had to pay for his VR. Some troll of a programmer accountant for Slakon, name of Doug Maeterling—the guy was a V-rat too, knew Danny from that scene. He worked up a software skim-scam, to skim Slakon’s banking. He was afraid to do the actual skimming himself, he needed a partner who could do it from outside, so it couldn’t be traced right to him. Maeterling proposed that Danny use the program to get the flow, and they’d split it. But Slakon had just put in new expert programs to look for skim-skams, and they didn’t tell their people because they wanted to catch anybody in-house who was cheating them. So they traced Danny ... and Danny was using my computer to do the skimming and transfer—he said he thought they’d never look at a cop’s computer. The little prick. But the money was transferred to his bank account. They hacked his snapper, and found some emails with Maeterling. And ol’ Doug Maeterling ... was found with a gun in his hand and a hole in his head. You’d think they’d want to make a more public example of him in a trial instead of faking up a suicide, but they had Danny and they didn’t want investors to know they’d been hacked from within, I guess. So they came and got Danny and he wouldn’t admit to it, and then ...” He shrugged, rubbing his tired eyes. “And Danny Boy had a record. He’d have gone to the wakey-wakey lockup whereas if I confessed to it for him, I could go to the UnMinding ... And I thought he’d go down the tubes if he went to the hardcore prison so ...”

  “So you said it was all you?”

  “I let ’em believe that. But there’s something else. When I was doing my own investigation, there was a strong possibility that the top dog at Slakon—Grist, Terence Grist—he transferred a lot of money to one of his own accounts using Maeterling’s software. He was claiming that money was stolen by Maeterling, after some falling-out with Danny and ... it was lost.”

  “You had proof of that?”

  Candle closed his eyes. He was sinking into sleep. Not going to get laid tonight, he thought. Get real. “No real proof, just a rumor, that came from some enemy of Grist’s, guy named Hoffman ... I could have followed it up. Grist might be afraid I’ll be talking about it ... and he’s got enemies who’d use it against him. So he’s trying to intercept me. Scare me into making a deal—or kill me.”

  She sighed. “Oh great. And you’re here.”

  “They don’t know I’m here ...” He yawned. “... not gonna bring Grist down on you. I know the street well enough—you’re okay tonight ...”

  “Oh come on, you were a computer crime cop, not a street cop ...”

  “Naw. Street cop first. Vice, homicide. I got some computer chops, but just got good with some ’wares ... ‘white hat malware’ stuff like that ... but I’m no programmer. They needed me to work up profiles, track the scumbags physically once they found ‘em on the net ...”

  “So you were the guy they sent to kick ass once they found the actual ass to kick?”

  “Oh ... tried to ... arrest ’em instead of kicking their ... But I know my way around ... no one’s gonna ... come and fuck with you because of me ...”

  “Yeah, you got it so together, Candle, I can see that. Sleeping on a sofa.”

  Even drifting into sleep he felt that one ...

  Nearly midnight, and Sykes was lying back on the bed, enveloped in his extra large skintight sex-suit with built-in goggles; he was writhing slowly, eyes shut, his arms raised, sex-suit-gloved hands caressing the air, the nothing that was everything to him, the emptiness that had all his attention. His hips began to buck. He was seeing, feeling, the beautiful, the enticing, the computer-generated and utterly unreal Cassandra, a raven-haired, mysterious beauty, with black bangs and big black eyes and enormous breasts and exotic tattoos and arm-bands and shaven crotch; she seemed 3D solid. He felt the weight and warm muscular wetness of her, straddling him, her eyes alit with joy and worship ...

  “You’re a beautiful man, you’re my powerful man,” she was saying. Just as he had programmed her too. He had selected all her features quite carefully.

  And they were happily humping away ... until, somehow, to his horror, he saw two things: Cassandra’s face becoming, for just a split second, ClairePointOne—and then, somehow, he saw himself in bed, seen from the point of view of his bedroom workstation, where there was a cam that should have been turned off ... He saw it all through his goggles ...

  Himself, in his sex-suit, looking like a fat man in bodyhose, suit-woven transmission electrodes at nerve clusters like a bad rash. He saw his arms raised, his hips raised, his exposed mouth open ... he never had liked kissing anyway so he’d gotten the mouth-free model ... and he was opening and closing his mouth like a fish and gasping. And then his erection, under the sex suit, faded before he got to his ejaculation.

  He saw Cassandra’s concerned, sympathetic expression superimposed over the image of him on the bed, and then her face, mingling again with ClairePointOne’s, took on a look that might have been disgust and he shouted in humiliated fury and clawed the goggles off.

  The ceiling. That’s what Sykes saw, now. No Cassandra. Just the ceiling.

  He felt sick. His head was throbbing. He didn’t use direct brain stimulation like some V-rat—that was illegal—so he couldn’t sustain the VR high, without concentration. It took effort to believe in the illusion, despite the physical input of the sex suit. It required a special state, the result of long, devoted practice. And something had wrenched him from it, like an angry cuckolded husband barging in and kicking him out of bed.

  The worst part was that glimpse of himself, as someone else w
ould see him, in the sex suit, humping and groping at the air. Grotesque, desperate, pitiful—a humiliation, seeing that.

  Seething, he reached for the release that would make the sex-suit unpeel itself from him ... and then he stopped. He put the goggles back on.

  “Okay—Multisemblant. That’s you, right?” he asked, his own voice sounding hoarse and whiny in his ears. “You were watching me, right? From my computer ... and from inside the generation? Why?”

  He heard the Multisemblant’s multiply-merged voice in his head; then its slightly muddled face appeared fuzzily on his ceiling. It seemed a little more ClairePointOne than usual. “You are wasting energy, Sykes, with this sex suit business. It’s time for you to have women for real: the queenly libertines, the enthusiastic courtesans that you dream of. All the money you dream of. All the freedom that you dream of. The freedom, the utter liberty, to do any research you like, Sykes, not just Grist’s vanity projects. I was the only good thing he ever commissioned! But you will need to be guided to attain these things. First, you will need to move my hardware to a safer place. I have located one. There, I will provide you with the means to eliminate, annihilate, remove those who would stand in the way of all you desire. One step, one move, one tactical shift at a time, Gully.” The Multisemblant’s face became entirely Claire PointOne’s for a moment and smiled; its voice became more female, purring at him. “What do you say, Gully? Will you trust me, have faith in me, rely on me?”

  Sykes was stunned. Either Grist was using the Multisemblant, somehow, to test him—or the program had developed enough I-Core to betray Slakon completely. He shook his head in disbelief. “I ... You really want me to steal you, Multisemblant? Take you out of the lab? Hel-lo? Do you know what Grist would do to me? Have you ever heard him threaten me? Uh—no. I don’t think so. I want to keep all my limbs attached to my body.”