Cybernetic Samurai

by Victor Milán

  —I have a better idea.

  ???

  —You’ve created many dreams for me. Now, why not let me craft one for you?

  Can you do that? Disbelieving. She felt that rippling at the edges of her consciousness that she knew to be his laughter. Of course you can.

  —Would you like that?

  Yes.

  +

  An image formed in her mind. It didn’t spring full blown into being like the preprogrammed scenarios, nor scan into being back and forth, top to bottom, like an image on the big screen. Instead it manifested itself first in rectangles, blocks of green and blue and slate gray, appearing as if by random, patches of color on the Void. Then they began to rough out shapes: green foreground, a brown and gray prominence, a rectilinear sky.

  In a moment the rectangles resolved into a recognizable picture of a meadow overlooked by a blunt, rocky cliff, with cubist swatches of cloud hanging in the sky. Then the rough, unnatural angles began to dissolve. As though she had put on her glasses, everything came abruptly into focus: the green mountain meadow surrounded by pines with straight reddish boles thrusting toward rounded scoops of cloud with wispy paintbrush edges.

  “It’s beautiful.” She started; she hadn’t spoken, yet she “heard” the words plainly. She felt the grass pliant and warm beneath her feet, sunlight teasing hot on her face and belly and breasts, tasted moist earth and grass riding a feathering breeze.

  “Turn around,” a voice behind her said.

  She spun, startled. A naked man stood there—youth, rather, He was tall, with broad shoulders, tapering torso overlaid with flat, hard muscles, narrow waist, long sinewy legs with the almost metallic sheen of skin when little or no body fat cushions it from muscle. In spite of his height he was unmistakably Japanese. Straight black hair, long and unbound, blew in strands across a broad, high-cheekboned face. The nose was straight, the mouth wide and smiling, the chin rather pointed, giving the face a slightly foxy look. His forehead was high, broad, unlined. The eyes with their prominent smooth sweeps of epicanthic fold were wide and brown and happy, sharply slanted. He was beautiful. If I’d ever fantasized about a perfect man, she thought—a private thought, withheld from rapport—this is what he’d look like.

  Subconsciously something bothered her. Then she realized that the sun was shining full in that perfect face—and in those perfect innocent eyes. She laughed, her voice high and girlish in her ears. “It’s wonderful, TOKUGAWA dear. But you’ve got the sun in your eyes, my love. You should be squinting—as much as I hate to have you mess up the gorgeous lines of your face.”

  He grinned back and narrowed his eyes. “So I am. I should add a little more sting to the sun, so I’ll be able to remember that sort of detail.” His eyes found hers, held them, “Besides, I was too occupied looking at you to pay attention to the sun.”

  She started to laugh again, delighted that her brainchild was learning flattery. Then the thought struck her like a cold fist in the belly: few people had ever found anything to flatter her about. She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  He held up his hand. In it he suddenly had a mirror, a perfect disc, perfectly reflecting, like a window onto another world. “Come closer. See yourself, Elizabeth.”

  Hesitantly, she took a step forward. She frowned, leaned forward to peer into the mirror.

  With a scream she tore loose from rapport.

  -

  Free floating ended. She stirred, felt firmness below, cool thin cumbrance above. Fluorescent light seeped under her eyelids, stabbed at her eyes like knives. With the heightened sensory acuteness that tended to follow a return to the real world from rapport, she sensed the subliminal flicker of the lights.

  Her whole body ached as if muscles had been torn loose from bone with red-hot pincers. She whimpered, deep in her throat, felt self-disgust at the weakness, and then self-pity. She felt a hand grip hers, skin soft but somehow masculine in feel. She dared not open her eyes. A moment later she smelled cigarette smoke, recognized Wali Hassad’s aftershave. She gripped his hand feebly and slipped away again.

  “Do you feel better, Doctor?”

  This time the light seeping under her eyelids didn’t paper-cut her eyes. She braced herself, opened them a fingernail thickness. Pain, but no slicing agony. She opened her eyes to a blur of infirmary whiteness.

  “They brought your spare set of spectacles from your room, Doctor,” said the Japanese voice, deep and dry. “If you will permit me?” She felt the plastic pads descend on either side of her nose, hands fumbling to hook the wire retainers over her ears as clarity returned to the world.

  “There, Doctor.” The white-mustached face of Yoshimitsu Akaji hung above hers, weatherbeaten and ageless as one of the ancient stones in his garden. He smiled, as if embarrassed by the brief intimacy, and sat back in his chair.

  “I hope you are feeling better, Doctor. You had an acute attack of your condition, following your seizure. The doctors were very much concerned for a time.”

  She took stock of the room. A standard hospital cubicle, whitewashed walls and no window, with a fancy robot bed with a gel mattress that could shape itself to any form desired by the occupant and a com/comm screen poised above the foot of the bed on a right-angled extensor arm. Yoshimitsu sat with one leg crossed over the other, stoically hiding his discomfort at sitting in a gray steel chair that brooked no compromise with the curve of human spines; not for the first time, O’Neill wondered why hospitals were always furnished in the way she imagined prisons should be. On the stand beside the bed stood a yellow plastic pitcher for water, a couple of glasses of the same plastic, and a thin minaret of white china vase that exploded at the top into a dozen bright red roses.

  She tried to nod her head toward the flowers, found she could scarcely move it. “Who—?” The sound came out cracked, scarcely intelligible. She swallowed, tried again: “Who are they from?”

  Yoshimitsu looked away. “Your staff and assistants were very concerned about you.”

  “That’s nice—except there’s no way they could have afforded it. Flowers like this aren’t grown commercially in Japan.” And the import duties on foreign-grown flowers were ludicrous even by the standards of contemporary protectionism. At a conservative estimate, the bouquet must have cost a month’s salary for one of her assistants, and those weren’t low-paying positions. “It was sweet of them to think of me, but I don’t think they could have raised enough to buy that bouquet.”

  “When I learned of their intent, it was my honor to do what I could to help them realize it.”

  In her surprise she actually raised her head from the pillow. Tight-fisted old Yoshimitsu Akaji, springing for an extravagance like a bunch of imported roses? Her eyes began to sting again, and she let her head fall back. “Thank you,” she said weakly.

  “Your thanks are due your staff. It was their idea.”

  Silence settled. O’Neill felt despair seeping in around the edges of her mind. She stirred uneasily, and the gel filling of the bed molded itself to her new position.

  “The doctors were convinced you’d had a breakdown such as poor Dr. Ito suffered,” Yoshimitsu said. “Your staff had a hard time convincing them you’d had a few moments of lucidity after you fell out of the coil.” He shook his head. “They question whether you should expose yourself to the stresses of rapport again.”

  No rapport? she thought in reflex panic. Then she let herself slump back into torpor. I don’t know if I could ever bear rapport again. Not after what happened.

  She sensed Yoshimitsu’s scrutiny. “Doctor? Are you having a relapse?” She shook her head weakly. “I don’t believe I should stress you any further. May you have a speedy recovery, Doctor.” He rose, bowed briefly, and went out.

  She opened her mouth to call him back. Then she shut it slowly. There was nothing to say to him, to anyone.

  Despair is protean: it shapes itself to any need. Tossing and turning in her sweat in hospital sheets at the dark nadir of night’s catenary, O’
Neill wallowed in her new miseries. Later she would feel guilt for this. There were worse things than what she’d undergone, surely; someone who’d lost her lover in the greatest catastrophe since the Black Death, witnessed a massacre at a Red Cross camp north of Denver, had her body begin to decay into a lump of unresponsive protoplasm around her knew that all too well. And there were many people in the world—the hungry, the helpless, the frightened people waiting for one or another local war to sweep through and consume them like a brushfire—who knew worse pain. As was her wont, O’Neill would later suffer for the very triviality of the cause of her present suffering.

  But right now she felt like hell.

  How could he? she asked herself again. He had shared her deepest thoughts, her aspirations, her fears, seen that which she kept hidden away in dark crevasses exposed to the light. She and he had become one. And yet, and yet… he had done this.

  The image in the mirror had burned into her like a laser etching a microchip. A picture of apparent beauty: a naked woman, tall, with chestnut hair. Pale hazel eyes, nose slightly snubbed, cheekbones prominent in such a way that it appeared she had a touch of Amerindian blood; a slender neck, strong shoulders, breasts full but not overlarge, with brown aureoles the size of silver dollars; smooth flattened dome of belly, slim waist, flaring hips, legs strong and smooth and graceful. The tilt of the eyes, their color, the bone structure of the face: her. But one that had never been, not even in her fantasies. TOKUGAWA had taken an image of her as she was, stumpy, lumpy, large-boned, her body bloated, riddled with disease and with a computer’s skill at interpolation recast her as she would have been had she been born lovely and athletic.

  It was a flat negation of all that she was or would ever be.

  She turned in the bed again. Gelatin remolded itself in a futile attempt to bring her comfort. The ache in her muscles and eyeballs had lessened; the doctors had forced down the attack with massive doses of special experimental medicines that left her weakened with diarrhea, and a thin singing in her ears like a fingernail being drawn down an endless blackboard. She would be able to return to her lab in a day or two.

  But what’s left for me there?

  CHAPTER 14

  “Dr, O’Neill?”

  She frowned up from the notebook in which she scribbled loose, illegible handwriting. Takai Jisaburo had his head stuck through her office door, his handsome face solicitous. “I don’t wish to trouble you, so soon after your return to us. But there’s something I need to talk to you about, Doctor.”

  She let the notebook settle to the horizontal and laid the felt-tip pen down on it, After a moment she prodded, “Yes?”

  He glanced around. The lab’s pace was slow, almost relaxed, in marked contrast to the wired purposefulness that had animated it during the triumphant days of TOKUGAWA’s birth. Wali Hassad chainsmoked over in a corner of the main lab, arguing with Nagaoka in a halfhearted way about something or another. Kim Jhoon was off advising Aoki on TOKUGAWA’s vocational education. Downstairs the Kliemann Coil sat neglected. It would have been gathering cobwebs, had cobwebs been permitted in a Japanese laboratory. “It’s rather confidential, Doctor.”

  With ill grace O’Neill nodded him into her office. She rolled over next to the cluttered desk, parking her wheelchair beneath the framed motto from Hofstadter. He perched on the edge of her desk, eyes active, moving everywhere but toward her. Does he he ever sit in a chair? He reached into the pocket of his white shirt, started to draw out a pack of cigarettes. A warning glare from O’Neill stopped him. Only Hassad was permitted to smoke in her office. “Well, Dr. Takai? I’ve got a lot of things to do.” Actually, what she mainly had to do was search for ways not to think about TOKUGAWA. She just didn’t feel like dealing with Takai; he was too hyper for her this soon out of the hospital bed.

  He tapped the pack back into place. His fingers dithered briefly, then plucked out a light pen used to sketch on notebook computer screens. He tapped his front teeth briefly with it, then said, “It’s about the, uh, the chain of command here in the lab, Doctor.”

  She cocked an eyebrow. “Really? I find it quite satisfactory.”

  “Of course,” he continued, not seeming to have heard, “I’ll be moving up to take over for the unfortunate Dr. Ito. But what I really think we should discuss is the position of your chief assistants ’

  O’Neill carefully arranged her hands in her lap. “And why is that?”

  He tried to make a negligent gesture with one hand, but it was too choppy. “Really, Doctor, I think it would be only appropriate were I to replace Dr. Kim as your first assistant” The hands snapped back and forth to forestall her objection. “I’m not denigrating the talents of my colleague. He’s a fine scientist—a fine technician. But, really, the hardware development phase of the project is at an end. It’s now time to concentrate on refining and applying the software we have.” He smiled jerkily. “That’s my department.”

  “Actually,” O’Neill said, “we’ve refined the software about all we can.”

  Takai jerked a little, as if a slight electrical charge had passed through the fingers drumming on the few uncluttered centimenters of desk.

  “And,” O’Neill continued, “the application work is mainly being handled by Aoki and his assistants. If anything, the major work we’ve left to do falls into Dr. Ito’s specialty. The fact is, Doctor, that the TOKUGAWA Project has pretty much come to a successful conclusion. All that remains now is to continue the development of TOKUGAWA as a sentient being.” Her face writhed briefly, then composed itself.

  Takai looked at her, blinked slowly. “Doctor Ito is, unfortunately, no longer available. And, lacking a qualified psychologist—or psychocyberneticist, if you’ll pardon the neologism—who more appropriate to move into an executive position than a software expert? One of the best, if you’ll forgive my presumption in saying so.”

  As a matter of fact, Takai was one of the best. But O’Neill didn’t feel like stroking his slippery little ego by saying so, just now. “I like Dr. Kim just where he is. He’s more than just an excellent technician; he’s a very good lab manager.” He’s more than once covered for me during one of my fits of depression, she thought guiltily. “I appreciate your concern for the continued welfare of the project,” she went on, allowing him to feel an edge of irony, “but, frankly, I believe I will leave you in your present position.”

  “But he’s a Korean!”

  She looked at him, her eyes hard behind her thick round glasses. An ache began in her eyeballs, seeping back into her brain. So there it is, she thought. The meat of the matter, lying there stinking in the middle of my desk.

  “What of it?” she asked in carefully neutral tones.

  Sweat droplets clustered like tiny transparent geodesic domes at the tree line of his forehead. “But this is a Japanese project, paid for—need I remind you, Doctor?—by Japanese funds. It isn’t—isn’t appropriate for the chief assistant to be a foreigner. And especially a Korean!”

  “I don’t share your quaint prejudice against Koreans, Doctor. Such damned foolishness has no place in science, no matter what they may have told you when you were with ICOT. And while you’re at it, are you sure you don’t object to having the project headed by a foreigner?”

  He drew back mouthing denial. She bulldozed ahead. “And kindly permit me to correct a mistaken impression, Doctor: Dr. Ito will retain her status as my second assistant, until and unless competent medical personnel certify that she will never be competent to resume her duties. You will retain your position as third assistant. If that’s not satisfactory, then I suggest you tender your resignation. Good day, Doctor.”

  The ripe-wheat hue had leached from his features. He stood up and almost ran from the office, scarcely remembering to pause to let the door slide open before him. O’Neill collapsed deeper in her chair. I didn’t realize I was so tense, she thought, rubbing her temples with the fingertips of both hands. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so hard on him. But that was all I needed, c
oming on the heels of—

  “Doctor?”

  She looked up, chill trickling through her veins. “What do you want?’d she snapped, instantly regretting it.

  A painful pause. “I wanted to talk to you, Doctor. They turned off the communicator into your room in the infirmary. And I didn’t want to disturb you after you returned to your quarters last night.”

  For a moment she sat staring at her desk, noticing where a chip had been nicked out of the wood-grain-emulating plastic, and the way the pages of her trusty old copy of volume 2 of Feigenbaum and Cohen’s Handbook of Artificial Intelligence were so water-warped, a legacy of her lifelong addiction to reading in the bathub, that even the weight of books and ring binders lying on top of it wouldn’t force the pages to lie fully flat. The ache in her eyes increased in amplitude. “What’s there to say?” she said bitterly. “You knew what that—that obscene shadow show would do to me. You’ve been inside my head. I don’t know why you did it, but—” She fluttered her fingers in a feeble, angry gesture. Somehow she had no energy to complete the sentence.

  “But I didn’t—I had no idea it would do that to you.” Confused pain rippled through the words, and somewhere in the depths of herself O’Neill was still scientist enough to take a certain pride in her achievement; here was the decisive answer to the Turing test: there was no way to tell that it wasn’t a person speaking—because it was. “If I’ve hurt you, then nothing will ever enable me to forgive myself, Elizabeth. If you won’t believe me, use the rapport device, see for yourself that I meant no harm. I only wanted to make you happy.”

  She uttered a brittle caw of laughter. “You think I’d trust you, after what you’ve pulled? What have you got in store for me now? A garter belt and panties?”

  For a long time TOKUGAWA didn’t answer. The subdued sounds of business as usual filtered through the soundproofing of the office, and she began to be aware, in a way she hadn’t for years, of the muted drone of the single great organism that was Yoshimitsu castle, the machinery that kept air circulating, temperatures controlled, water and power flowing, people moving in a ceaseless vascular stream.