by Victor Milán
“I—” He stopped, at a loss as to how to handle this situation. “No, TOKUGAWA, I’m not your father. Nor is O’Neill really your mother—”
“She is too!”
Yoshimitsu looked at the computer console and sighed. Ask not, he thought, covertly proud of the paraphrase, lest ye receive. All of his life he’d desired little more than to be able to talk with a truly sentient machine. Now he had his wish, and it was inevitable that the machine, having freedom of choice, should choose to talk back to him. In spite of himself, he grinned. “Very well. At any rate, I have a son, Shigeo. And a daughter, too. And you—I don’t think you properly have a mother or a father. That is…”
Despite O’Neill’s certainties, he didn’t know whether TOKUGAWA had feelings or not, but if he did, he didn’t wish to hurt them. “Maybe you’d better talk to Dr. O’Neill about this,” he finished lamely.
“I will. Thank you very much, Yoshimitsu-sama.” For just an instant, Yoshimitsu Akaji had the eeriest feeling, as if a presence had just left the room.
He looked down at his ruined calligraphy. Grave and terrible. He shook his head ruefully, and smiled.
CHAPTER 5
“Dr. O’Neill?”
O’Neill sat in her wheelchair cursing the gang of technicians swarming over the new contraption they were installing in the gallery of TOKUGAWA’s lab, next to the IPN. It looked like either something from a bad science fiction movie or a Bauhaus electric chair: raised dais, a massive chair upon it, all chrome and white plastic and verniers and dials and whorls of silver-white fiberoptic cable ribbon, at the top of it a headpiece like a salon hairdryer made from an inverted silver wok. This was the infamous Kliemann Direct Sensory-Center Stimulation Coil, a device so radical and new that had O’Neill’s former compatriots known she was involved with one, they would have dismissed her as a crackpot once again. A device that could both read and stimulate electric currents within the human brain—a direct human/computer interface. If it worked, it would bring about a quantum leap in TOKUGAWA’s education, and human knowledge in general. O’Neill would have been so excited she could barely contain herself if she hadn’t been so pissed off at the way the techs were fumbling with the damned thing. She looked up, frowning.
“Not now, TOKUGAWA. I’m busy.”
“But I want to talk to you. Yoshimitsu-sama told me to talk to you.”
O’Neill turned her head and peered over the tops of her glasses at TOKUGAWA’s sensory pickup over by the wall of the lab. “Did I hear you correctly? You are never, never, to speak to Yoshimitsu-sama without my permission. Is that understood?”
“Yes, but—”
“No buts. And another thing. You’ve got to quit making monster faces appear on people’s com/comm screens in the middle of the night. You’ve frightened some of the Koreans terribly.”
“But I get bored.”
O’Neill sighed. There was so much they didn’t know about the nature of TOKUGAWA’s intelligence. It was highly possible that he could think hundreds, thousands, even millions of times faster than a human. Was her hour an eon to him? “Honey, I know. I’m sorry. But I can’t talk to you now. I’m very busy.”
Silence. After a moment she turned the wheelchair back to the Kliemann Coil with a servomotor whir. “All right, you lizards,” she said, “let’s see if you can get it right this time.”
* * * * *
At the base of Honshu’s tail lay the ancient city of Kyoto, long called the City of Light, famed for its traditions, its serenity, its collection of beautiful and definitive gardens.
These days it managed to cling to a few shreds of identity, though it had been swallowed by the vast sprawlurb of Tokaido. Its serenity was mostly relative to the adrenal buzz of the rest of the metroplex, but the lights were still there—with a vengeance.
Most of the city was a mountain basin filled with blackness, homes blacked out by power rationing. Downtown, though… a river of fire, a frontal assault of lights blasting the night in a million colors, louder than the unceasing million-throated blare of automobile horns. Down here power use was wide open, gift of a government ever solicitous of favored enterprises—or the ingenuity of less favored businessfolk running black lines, illegal draws undetectable against the background glare. If homeowners defied rationing, they did so behind heavy blackout curtains. Down here at the white-hot core of things defiance camouflaged itself in dazzle.
Garish slogans chased one another up and down the sky in the five character sets used by the Japanese: kanji, katakana, hiragana, romaji—the Roman alphabet—and Arabic numerals. Here and there, Korean characters shone much more discreetly, hesitant to call overmuch attention to themselves. Light flooded from the front of stores and clubs and all-night malls. Above all loomed holographic billboards, more solid than life in air thick with wood smoke. Here was a three-story bottle of a domestic soft drink that no one in his right mind would drink (if you wanted Coke, you made black-market connections and paid black-market prices—and hoped the seller wasn’t an informer on the side); there the willowy figure of the lovely, Western-looking Japanese adolescent known to every Japanese as the embodiment of the many virtues of Silhouette cigarettes; there the portly figure of a Japanese gentleman in Western dress, prime minister candidate for Komeito, the Japanese Communist Party, whose ultranationalist and militaristic policies resembled nothing so much as those of the Tojo regime. Robot shops, holo-movie houses, massage parlors, prosthesis dives, teahouses and topless bars, games parlors, all ablaze, a trillion scintilla of need and greed and nervous energy.
Out of the lava stream Yoshimitsu Shigeo strolled into the lobby of an apartment building in the fashionable foothills, near the famed Ryoanji Temple, with a red-haired woman a head taller than he on his arm and a pair of ambulatory ethnic-Chinese mountains with necks wider than their bulletshaped heads and that standard underarm bulge lumbering along behind. Scanners did their gig on the approaching procession. See-through laminate-armor doors whispered open before them, a uniformed guard nodded respectfully over the firing port of his security booth as Yoshimitsu Shigeo and entourage swept past.
Upstairs Chang stood with Shigeo and his friend in the hall, huge hand hovering like a gnarled mutant hummingbird near the butt of his MRS.40-caliber caseless machine pistol, while his buddy Eng checked the master’s apartment. Eng reappeared, nodded all-clear with hazy-soft fluorescence silvering his shaven pate. The two faded into their own cubby next door, and Shigeo escorted his lady fair into his bower.
No sooner had the door shut behind them than he began to nuzzle her crane-graceful neck. Gently, she pushed him away. “Not just now, Shig, honey. I’m all hot and sweaty from my act.” She gave him a kiss redolent of cheap cognac and used cigarette smoke and swayed off down the corridor to the bathroom, hips undulant beneath the sheer green sheath silk of her dress.
Shigeo shrugged off his coat and handed it to one of his matched set of valet robots, kimono-clad and discreet, which approached silently on a set of omniwheels not unlike those on Dr. O’Neill’s powered chair. Rubbing his hands together, he padded down the short hallway to the bedroom. The lights came softly on as he entered. He kicked off his clogs, took off the heavy gold chain around his neck and laid it among the other items of personal jewelry scattered carelessly across the top of a dresser, lay down in his white pants and noisy Hawaiian shirt on the waterbed. From the bathroom adjoining came the rush of water. He smiled slightly and said, “Gentle massage.”
Like all the rest of the thousand and one nifty gadgets crammed into the tiny apartment, Shigeo’s miracle waterbed was controlled by a Gen-5 master unit. At his command the bed began to vibrate beneath him, teasing away tension with soothing, insistent ripples. He reached out a hand. His other valet robot was there with its usual perfect timing, to hand him the customary whiskey sour with which he cut the cloying sweetness of all the Mai Tais he had poured down his throat watching Kelli’s turn at the Banyan Tree. He drank, sighed, relaxed.
The apart
ment was small by Western standards—bedroom , living room, bath, fully automated kitchen—but far more spacious than most families in urban Japan could boast. Travel posters covered the walls like space-warp gates to elsewhere: the Costa Brava, the Riviera—Shigeo had taken it as a personal loss when Nice got rocketed flat during last year’s abortive revolt of EuroFront mercs—the Comoro Islands, Jamaica. A bookcase set in the wall over the magnificent automated waterbed held books of French decadent poetry, pornographic coffee table books, a half dozen books on ceramics. Sprays of flowers, replenished every day, fountained like fireworks from vases set in niches between the posters. The vases were Shigeo’s own, in primitive style; they were quite good.
Beneath a holoposter of Rio de Janeiro Shigeo’s all-purpose com/comm console sat on a desk of dark, lovingly polished Indonesian hardwood. Next to the desk, attired in a kimono decorated with printed cherry blossoms, stood Oba-san, one of his matched pair of doboshu robots. Every house in Japan with pretensions to at least middle-class status had had a simple servant robot for years and years, capable of simple tasks like vacuuming, picking up minor scatter, folding the laundry, and putting away the dishes. Grandma and Grandpa, Shigeo’s pair, were vastly more sophisticated. They possessed full-dress human-emulating AI, hooked as they were into the expensive Gen-5 computer that ran the apartment as a whole. They performed all the functions of the cheaper household robots and more.
Of itself, the master computer could perform a multitude of tasks, maintaining temperature and humidity, scanning incoming communications, responding to its master’s whim by turning on and off music, the waterbed, the television screens that occupied entire walls of the bedroom and living room. The robots acted as the computer’s hands, performing tasks that could not be done directly by controlling flows of input or energy. They not only kept the apartment spotless, they mixed Shigeo’s drinks, groomed his collection of gaudy if expensive clothing, cooked with all the skills of the exceedingly expensive cordon bleu software resident in the household database. A touch over a meter and a half in height they stood, flattened cylinders on flared bases that hid an omnidirectional wheel array. Their manipulators were hands, not claws, equipped with three fingers and a thumb like an old cartoon character’s, and developed, like their wheels, from human prosthetic designs. Topping it all off of course were flat-faced “heads,” with the obligatory twin optical scanners—one would have sufficed-—above smiling wedges of speech synthesizer grid. They resembled nothing so much as the cute, friendly robots in a hundred bad science fiction films. By this stage of the game, it was impossible to say whether art was imitating life or vice versa.
Kelli’s voice drifted out of the bathroom, breasting the white-noise tide of the shower in brave little spindrift swatches. Shigeo recognized a mournful pop ballad recently become popular in Japan, an English-language import from Kelli’s native EasyCo, the Eastern Seaboard Coalition. It took some deduction to make the identification; Kelli was tone-deaf by either Western or native Japanese musical canons.
He thought of Kelli’s long, lithe body glossed by water, and he smiled, feeling a happy pressure at the fly of his white trousers. The six-foot American-born redhead perfectly matched his sexual fantasies, in appearance, ability, and lack of inhibition. She was less stupid than he would have expected, given where he’d found her, and she at least pretended to listen sympathetically to recitations of his many problems. His father’s waywardness, which made it difficult for YTC to do business in the Japanese community. The old man’s refusal to let go, to permit Shigeo actually to perform the duties of the president of a major corporation. And, finally, the latest indignity: importing a gaijin scientist to build a machine to tell Shigeo what to do.
Probably his lady friend—who styled herself with the unlikely name of “Kelli Savage”—expected him to marry her, or at least make her his official concubine, as was coming back into fashion among Japan’s new elite. He smiled at the thought. No way, as her American compatriots would have said. Shigeo was not stupid, merely horny.
In fact, he was a long way from stupid—if only his father would acknowledge it. Despite a natural inclination toward leisure, he’d gone through the same killing regimen any Japanese child was put through if his parents wanted him to go anywhere: years of schooling, relentless tutoring, forced cramming, culminating in the one big shot at the golden (or at least wheat-colored) life: college entrance exams. Against the expectation of almost everyone, except of Aoki Hideo, YTC’s general manager and the closest thing to a friend Shigeo had had when growing up, Shigeo had won the big prize: entrance to Tokyo Imperial University, the renowned Todai. It was pure achievement. Not all the influence his or anybody else’s father cold bring to bear was enough to gain that honor, only personal merit. It was the first and last time in his life that his father showed overt pride in him.
In many ways, his life seemed to have run all downhill from there.
He took another sip of his drink. This was foolish; if he agitated his mind overmuch he wouldn’t be able to take pleasure from the scrumptious Kelli, and that would be a waste. “Television,” he said aloud.
Obedient to his whim, the central computer switched on the giant wall screen. A weird stilted demon with blue distorted features, pointed nose and ears, a spired golden helmet, and ornately brocaded blue robe menaced a lovely princess with odd, jerky motions. Shigeo made a face; a puppet play satcast from Indonesia. “Channel scan. Three-second interval.” He set the drink down on the bedside table, put his hands behind his head, and let the waterbed caress him as he surveyed the night’s video offerings.
You could see anything on satellite broadcasts—anything. Physics lessons, sex shows, reruns of classic American sitcoms, opera, bullfights, sex shows, live or taped coverage of skirmishing between the Front and PanEurope in Luxembourg’s green hills, game shows—including the infamous Brazilian “You Bet Your Life”—poetry readings, ball games, subversive lectures, concerts, market reports, and, of course, sex shows. If you wanted to—and had the requisite amount of reasonably hard currency—you could even buy your own access and regale the entire world, and the factories orbiting above, with whatever entered your head. It made every government in the world absolutely crazy. And there was not one thing they could do about it,
It was the last free market, or the ultimate black market, depending on how you chose to look at it. The vast international information network, of which the video broadcast channels comprised but a fraction. An electronic Global Village for true, with its own laws and customs—such as they were. Commentators in the state-controlled media lamented “information hemorrhages” and “public demoralization.” In vain. The medium of pure information was too diffuse to be channeled or regulated; many of the companies that participated in the net had their registries in the shaggier Third World countries, the more radical the better.
It was a long-standing tradition; in the LDC’s, ever close to the raw edge of starvation, even the loudest of ideologues knew which side his bread was buttered on. Only an absolute loonytune, a Masie Nguema or a Pol Pot, held true to doctrine when a steady source of hard foreign exchange was concerned—and they didn’t last. Even the bumptious Idi Amin of fond memory kept his trade channels open—and if he abused the occasional British merchant to assuage lingering colonial aches, Eastern European and American commercial travelers and reps from every nation of black Africa came and went unhindered. The more developed countries, riding on a cushion of surplus—mighty thin, these days—were more prone to expedient political decisions. The radical tercer mundo was safe as houses.
Yet there still wasn’t anything good on TV. There was a limit to how much even Yoshimitsu Shigeo could watch women having sex with animals, and he had no wish at all to watch some hapless game show loser being flayed alive somewhere in the backwoods of Brazil. A baseball game between the Fukuoka Rockets—his home team—and the Ninja from Iga-Ueno briefly tempted him, but he said, “Switch it off,” sulkily, and the door to the bathr
oom hissed open.
Kelli came out wearing a black kimono printed with white impressionist streaks of reeds and splashed with blossoms, lavender and pale green. Mist will-o’-the-wisps danced attendance from the bathroom door as she glided toward the bed,
At a low-voiced command from Shigeo the lights dimmed to a whisper. For a moment she stood at the foot of the bed smiling at him, her eyes violet, bottomless. Then she bent forward and came onto the bed. Her kimono fell open. Her breasts were shadowed roundnesses, full and free.
She unbuttoned the front of his white trousers, slipped his penis free. It had the consistency of half-set pudding. She rolled it between her palms like a bit of dough, and it began to firm. She took him in her mouth, gave gentle suction, the tip of her tongue flicking teasingly, insistently at the underside of his glans. He moaned. One hand fisted in the purple satin sheets, the other twisted endless aimless cat’s cradles in the red hair spilling out across her shoulders and down her back, dark in the dimness, accented with amber.
He stiffened. She rode her head up and down, letting him slip agonizingly in and out between taut, saliva-slick lips, His plump thighs rubbed together in cricket agitation.
She drew him to the break point of twisting effusion, the outflow of his ki, and at the last moment pulled back, smiled, kissed the fat wet purple head of his cock. He clutched at her hair, insistent as a small boy after a lollipop. She pulled away, sat up, let the kimono slip from her shoulders. His eyes mauled her. He loved the bikini lines, startling white-band backgrounds to wide brown aureoles and the chestnut chaos of her bush. Smiling from within the folds of her hair, she flowed up him and her mouth met his, tongue probing.
He grabbed at her breasts. She broke away, lips moist with mingled saliva, raised herself above him on her arms. He stuffed a breast in his mouth, began to suckle her greedily, while she watched him with half-smiling Mona Lisa indulgence. One hand slid down the glorious length of her, traversed her hip, fumbled in the undergrowth of her pubic hair for a moment then plunged inside, thrusting, eagerly random, growing wet amid soft sucking sounds. She chewed her lower lip and cradled his head. When her nipple came to cherry firmness, he pushed her onto her back and rolled atop her, squirming out of his pants with surprising agility. She unbuttoned the gaudy shirt and tossed it aside. He supported himself above her, plump arms trembling, while she guided him to her. He thrust inside, frantic to seize the tumescent moment before it slipped away. She gave a small gasp and her nails made furrows in his arms.
