Slant

by Eikeltje

"I don't react well to threats," Martin says. "I can't be forced to do something

  illegal, whatever the money or the threats. I think you should--"

  "I could kill you myself."

  Martin stands. "Get out."

  "I could be just like them, but I'm not. I really am not." He raises his arms

  and shouts, "No agreements, no pressure. I'd give it all up. Doctor, you can

  have it all ... Just get me out of this!"

  "I've told you what my limits are, Mr. Crest. I can give you the names of

  very discreet emergency therapists--"

  Crest stands and brushes off his elbows, though the chair arms are not dusty.

  His voice is steady now. "I'm sorry to have wasted your time. I'll feed fifty K

  into your accounts for your trouble."

  "No need," Martin says, knowing that his anger is completely inappropriate,

  but feeling very angry.

  Martin escorts Crest to the door. Crest pauses, turns as if to say something

  more, and then leaves.

  Martin sighs deeply, collects himself. He walks into the lobby a few minutes

  later. Arnold and Kim stare at him, sharing his relief and astonishment. They

  go to the window looking down on the street and see a small black limousine

  move into traffic three floors below.

  "That is the strangest encounter I've had in years," Martin says. He glances

  at Kim. "Evaluation?"

  "He's real close," Kim says. "He should go to a primary therapist."

  "That's what I told him. He wouldn't listen."

  "Then there's nothing we can do."

  Nevertheless, Martin feels a jab of guilt. He has not even re-applied for a

  federal license. He is sure he would be turned down--and that could be a

  black mark against his current practice.

  Like Crest, he, too, has a tortuous path to follow.

  "Doctor," Arnold says. "Ms. Carrilund got your touch and needs to respond

  right away. I wouldn't interrupt before the next client, but--"

  He thinks of Crest's situation, and how prevalent in the real world that

  kind of cruel competition must be, to drag down even the wealthiest. "I'll take it," Martin says.

  He returns to his office and faces the pad on the desk. Carrilund appears

  before him in complete detail, mid-fifties, white-blonde, in a stylishly tailored

  32 GEG

  commons suit with ruffle sleeves. She is handsome and aging naturally, and

  Martin concludes she must have been dangerously beautiful in her youth. In

  some respects she reminds him of Carol--but many women remind him of

  Carol now.

  "I'm glad you have time to talk, Dr. Burke," Carrilund begins. "Your work

  has been highly recommended by a number of our clients."

  "I'm pleased to hear that," Martin says. His mouth is still sour. He pours

  himself a glass of water from the carafe on his desk and takes a sip.

  "Have you noticed an increase in fallbacks in your practice?" Carrilund asks.

  "No. Most of my practice is with core therapy rejects."

  "I see. All of our clients with you now are CTRs, are they not?"

  "Yes."

  "Dr. Burke, my sources tell me you're likely to receive a flood of fallback

  and CTR clients in the next few months."

  "From your agency?" Martin asks.

  "Perhaps, but not necessarily through this office. We've had CTR notices on

  over half our clients going into primary therapy. That's not something I would

  like blown to the ribes, Dr. Burke, but it's not going to be a secret for long."

  Martin whistles. "Extraordinary," he says.

  "We've never seen rates higher than five percent in all the years I've been

  with Workers Inc. I was wondering if you'd be interested in participating in

  a little study."

  "I don't see why not--if this is a real, long-term problem. But as I said, in

  my practice, I would not notice such a trend until..." What she has said

  suddenly hits him. He feels a little queasy.

  "There are only five doctors in your line of work in the Corridor," Carrilund

  says. "I think you're going to see a big increase in your business."

  If her statistics were not just flukes, that would mean . . . He quickly calculates.

  Tens of thousands for each of the five. "I can't handle that kind of

  load."

  Carrilund smiles sympathetically. "It could be a big problem for us all.

  We'd like to work with you to learn the root causes... If there are any. We're

  looking at entry-level workers, most of them in their late teens and early

  twenties, going through their first qualification inspections. It's heartbreaking

  for them, Doctor. It could be a challenge to our whole economy."

  "I understand that. Please count me in, and keep me informed."

  "Thank you, Dr. Burke. I will."

  "And make an arrangement with my office for a personal meeting."

  "Thank you." They exchange home sigs. Carrilund smiles sedately and-Mar-tin

  transfers her to Arnold.

  Martin sits lost in thought. He came very close to being CTR himself, years

  ago; too close to having to face, day after day, for years on end, the prospect

  of an inner voice that murmurs of confusion and pain and much, much worse.

  / SLANT 33

  He has raised his hands, unconsciously, as if to ward off something coming

  toward him. With another shudder, he drops them to his lap, composes himself,

  and tells Arnold to send in Mrs. Avril De Johns.

  Access to knowledge and information is necessary to a dataflow

  economy. But it will cost you...

  Every single access will cost you. A penny here, a thousand dollars there,

  a million a year over there somewhere.., subscriptions and encryptions and

  decryptions. If you haven't already shown yourself to be a part of the flow--if

  you aren't a student given research dispensation, or already earning your way by

  turning information into knowledge and that into money and work--the action anatomy

  of society--it's a tough old world.

  Perhaps in discouragement you become one of the disaffected and spend all your

  federal dole on the more flagrant Yox, drowning yourself in enervating lies. You're allowed,

  but you're out of the loop. One-way flow is not a game; it's a sucking little death.

  --The U,S, Government Digiman on Dataflow Economics,

  56r" Revision, 2052

  Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now. Neither

  man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism processes

  data according to its domain, its environment; you, with all your brains,

  would soon be useless in a mouse's universe...

  --Lloyd Ricardo, Pressed Between Two Flat Seconds:

  Preserving the Human Flower

  It's not your grandmother's world. It was never your grandmother's

  world.

  Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie

  4 THINKER, FEELER

  Nathan Rashid gives his fiancee, Ayesha Kale, a tour of Mind Design's most

  amous inhabitant, Jill.

  Nathan is Jill's new chief engineer and friend. He replaced Roger Atkins

  two years ago, when Atkins became chief administrator for Mind Design's new

  thinker development.

  Nathan headed the team that brought her back from her collapse, and Jill

  regards him with warm affection. She does not believe he will do anything to

  34 GREG BEAR

  reduce her functions or alter her present state. After a
ll, it was Nathan who

  devised the ornate Loop Detail Interrupt that restored her to awareness and

  full function.

  Jill trusts him, but she has not told him about the mystery.

  Nathan and Ayesha stand in a broad cream-colored room with a central riser

  surrounded by transparent glass plates. On the riser sits a snow-white cube

  about one meter on a side, attended by three smaller cubes. Nathan is thirty-five,

  dark-haired, broad-faced, with an immediate, eager, and sometimes mischievous

  smile. Ayesha is five years older, brown-haired, with large, all-absorbing

  black eyes and a mouth that seems ready to acknowledge

  disappointment.

  The cubes are connected by ribes as well as by direct optical links, which

  twinkle like blue eyes as they pass through the empty air between.

  "Is that her?" Ayesha asks.

  "That's her," Nathan says.

  "That's all?"

  Jill sits in warm and cold, feeling neither. Her emotions, as with all of us,

  do nor seem to come from her particular structures, though she is much more

  aware of her internal processes.

  "Most of her is here. Why, disappointed?"

  Jill's body, if she can be said to have one, is mainly in Del Mar and Palo

  Alto, California. There are many parts of her less than a few cubic centimeters

  in size spread through eleven different buildings along Southcoast. She is connected

  to these extensions through a variety of I/Os by ribes and satlinks and

  even a few tentative quantum gated links (which she finds annoying; they do

  not work all the time, and may in fact slow her thinking if relied upon exclusively).

  "She's so small!" Ayesha says.

  Nathan smiles. "She was twice as big before the refit."

  "Still, so small, to be so famous."

  Jill is listening, Nathan knows. She listens attentively to all of her inputs,

  but he does not know that a significant portion of her is in unlinked isolation,

  devoted much of the time to considering a mystery. She has pondered this

  mystery for several years, ever since her shutdown and redesign.

  She does not clearly remember events after her Feedback Fine Detail Collapse.

  But she remembers some things she should not be able to remember,

  and this is what intrigues her.

  "Why is she a she?" Ayesha asks.

  "She decided on her own. Roger Atkins may have started it When he named

  her after a girlfriend. Besides, she's a mother. We seed other hinkers from

  her."

  Jill is the most advanced thinker ever made, the first--on Earth--to become

  self-aware. She has a sibling in deep space, far from Earth, who achieved self

  /

  SLANT 35

  assume that it, too, suffered Feedback Fine Detail Collapse, and that all of its

  functions locked up, so that it now drifts around another star, alone and probably

  in a state equivalent to death.

  Generations from now, when other, more complex ships head for the stars,

  perhaps they will find and resurrect her sibling. Jill hopes she will be around for a reunion.

  She silently follows Nathan and Ayesha with her glass-almond eyes,

  mounted on thin rods protruding from the walls around the room. Ayesha

  valks around her like a zoo visitor examining an interesting animal in a cage.

  "She's the most powerful mind on the planet," Nathan says proudly. "Unless

  you believe Torino."

  "What does Torino say?"

  "He thinks there's a world-spanning bacterial mind," Nathan says lightly.

  "A mind, in germs?" Ayesha says, drawing her head back incredulously.

  "Really?"

  "Not like a human mind, or even like Jill, not socially self-aware. He thinks

  every bacterium is a node in a loosely connected network. That would make

  them parts of the largest distributed network anywhere--on Earth, at least."

  "Yeah, well, Jill can talk," Ayesha says. "And bacteria can't."

  Jill remembers some aspects of the FFDC collapse. She can even model some

  of its features. But after the collapse, her self-awareness ceased to exist. Or

  rather, it became so finely detailed, she modeled her selves so continuously and

  with such high resolution, that she reached her theoretical limits.

  And for a time, ceased to be.

  But in that time ...

  She has not told her creators about aspects of that mostly blank time. That

  not everything was blank puzzles her.

  "She doesn't even have a boyfriend, and already she's a mother!" Ayesha

  says wryly. "Better make her a boyfriend soon, or she's going to start cruising."

  "She's not even ten years old. We can ask her how she feels about it. Would

  you like to talk with her?"

  Ayesha suddenly blushes. "My God, is she listening?"

  "Of course. We keep nothing from Jill. Jill, how's it flowing today?"

  "Smooth, Nathan. And you?"

  "Damped a migraine at noon and I'm still a little cranky. This is my fiancee,

  Ayesha. Time to talk?"

  "For you, always," Jill says. "Hello, Ayesha."

  "I'm so embarrassed!" Ayesha says. "I'm sorry to be talking about you...

  behind your back... Where is your back?"

  "No offbnse taken. Where is my back, Nathan?"

  "I haven't the slightest idea. You're getting more sparky every week. I like

  that. My team needs a loop resolution report by two to hand over to the Feds,

  you know, the Thinker Safety people."

  36 GREG BEAR

  and Well-Being committee, headed by Rep. Maria Caldwell, D-WA., as a

  positive force in her life, but Mind Design's executives do not appreciate government

  interference.

  "Right. And I also need, ASAP, your work on future corporate/state government

  relations in the U.S. Rim. Got to pay our bills."

  "The flow charts and timelines, or the raw neural processing records?"

  "For now, just the charts and timelines."

  Ayesha listens in awe. Jill's voice is deep, a little husky, commanding yet

  pleasant. She seems to fill the large room. Jill notes, with some pleasure, that

  Ayesha is beginning to perspire nervously.

  "Nathan, I will need to discard the raw neural records to complete next

  week's work load."

  "Understood, but I don't have a bank reserved that's large enough to hold

  them. If I don't get one by the end of this week, go ahead and dump. I'll take

  responsibility."

  "Perhaps Representative Caldwell would be willing to arrange a storage

  site."

  "Ha ha. What else are you working on, Jill?"

  "I have thirty-one personal investigations--curiosity quests, as you call

  them. There are four outside projects sealed from Mind Design inquiry for the

  time being--"

  "I hate those outside jobs. Sooner or later one of them is going to require

  some loop re-engineering, and I don't have time. I wish they'd let me speck

  them out first."

  "All flows smooth with the outside tasks. I do have a number of questions

  to ask you, NathanMathan."

  "I beg your pardon? What is a NathanMathan?"

  "It's a term of endearment. I just made it up."

  Nathan laughs, and Ayesha laughs with him, a little uneasily, Jill thinks.

  She is testing him to see what he really thinks of her, whether he is of the

  opinion she is fully recovered, or liable to crippling eccentricitie
s. His reaction

  reveals a certain nervousness about unpredictable behavior, but no deep doubts.

  "Ask away, Jill. We have a few minutes before Ayesha has to leave and the

  masters whip me off to another meeting."

  "What does a thymic disturbance feel like? And how does it differ from the

  sensations of a pathic disturbance?"

  Ayesha turns to Nathan, wondering how he will answer this. Nathan rubs

  his elbow and considers. "You're asking how it j%/s to undergo a thymic

  imbalance, right?"

  "I believe the questions are sufficiently similar to be congruent."

  "Yes. Well, as I understand it, thymic imbalance is different from simply

  being sad or upset or deeply concerned about something. In humans, a chronic

  thvmic imbalance stems from stress-caused or biogenic neural damage, gen-

  /

  SLANT 37

  erally in the amygdala or the hippocampus. Judgments of one's well-being are

  impaired, and this invokes a sympathetic or parasympathetic response, jointly

  or in succession. Basic fight-or-flight but with many subtle variations."

  "I understand the etiology of these imbalances, Nathan-Mathan. But what

  does it fee/like to undergo them ?"

  "I'm not sure I can tell you, certainly not from first-hand experience. So far,

  knock wood, I'm a natural, Jill. I've never been depressed or imbalanced."

  "That means your internal responses to external problems fall within a certain

  range considered robust and normal."

  "So far. I'm not bragging, either. These things can happen to anybody, and

  for the stupidest reasons."

  "Likewise you have not experienced and do not understand the sensations