Matrix Man

by William C. Dietz

  He wanted to tell them the truth, that he'd been had and they along with him. He wanted to tell them that Frank Neely had been murdered, but he couldn't prove it. So, like thousands of journalists before him, Corvan settled for something less than the whole truth, and swore a silent oath that he'd learn the rest.

  Corvan turned a full circle so that the audience saw Horowitz being carried away on a stretcher, troopers searching the tents, and prisoners with their hands on top of their heads. His auto-iris closed down as he looked into the sun and opened up again when it had passed.

  Kim thought about going to the robo cam and decided not to. Corvan's view was both dramatic and telling. It matched his words.

  "People died here for reasons which aren't exactly clear. As you saw, one of them was an old friend of mine, Frank Neely, a man who had seen happier days, and called himself Captain Video. Why did Frank and his friends come here? What did they hope to accomplish through their illegal broadcasts? Was this bloodshed necessary? Those questions and more will be asked and answered during the next forty-eight hours. But no matter what the answers turn out to be, neither side of this conflict has any reason to celebrate. Rex Corvan reporting for News Network 56 from Canada's Banff National Park."

  Kim faded audio and video together and saw New York take it away. Meanwhile she continued to monitor the two cameras. Corvan was looking down at his dead friend, and Captain Dietrich was looking at him.

  Kim zoomed in on the officer's face. All traces of boyish charm had disappeared, and if looks could kill, Corvan would've been dead ten times over.

  2

  Carla Subido leaned back in her executive chair and examined Captain Hans Dietrich through narrowed eyes. They'd met during her year in Africa, both part of Numalo's sprawling network of friends and acquaintances, both tools of his enormous ambition. And while they'd discovered a certain similarity of world views, that had nothing to do with Dietrich's presence in her office. No, Dietrich belonged to Numalo, bound to the African by ties which Carla could only guess at. Ties which kept her from trusting him too much, from telling him that Hawkins was dead, that she'd changed the world.

  The German officer looked tired, his cammies were rumpled, and his combat boots were smeared with Canadian mud. Good. He'd placed duty before personal comfort. Carla liked that. She allowed Hans a rare smile and saw some of the stiffness go out of his shoulders. "Have a seat, Captain."

  Dietrich obeyed by choosing one of the two straight-backed guest chairs. They were made of highly polished oak and offered no padding whatsoever. Like everything in Carla's life, the chairs had a purpose. They encouraged people to speak concisely and leave. She watched Dietrich search for a comfortable position and fail to find one.

  "So, how'd things go?" She'd seen Rex Corvan's report, but wanted to hear Dietrich's version as well. A great deal would depend on what he said.

  Dietrich looked at Carla and felt a trickle of sweat run down his spine. She was perfect. Her lipstick and nail polish were an exact match for her red dress. The gleam of gold at her throat and ears provided just the right touch of elegance, of class, and served to bring everything together.

  By contrast, Dietrich could smell himself and was afraid that she could too. As his eyes met hers Dietrich wondered if she'd planned it that way on purpose, or just took her job so seriously that everything was a top priority. Both, probably. She was like a biological artifact, frozen in a glacier for a thousand years and only recently come to life. Patient and very cold. Well, there was no help for it. He'd tell the truth and hope for the best.

  “The raid didn't go well.''

  Carla nodded her agreement. "I'm glad you admit that. A well-intentioned failure can be forgiven, but stupidity, never. What went wrong?"

  The German was careful to keep his voice level and calm when he spoke. He'd dealt with officers like her. One sign of weakness, one indication of uncertainty, and they came in for the kill.

  "The problems started the moment we hit the LZ. We hoped the dissidents would fire first and give us an excuse to grease them. They didn't. As we approached their encampment, I saw Neely and put him down."

  Dietrich shrugged apologetically. "I was trying for Neely's heart, but gut shot him instead. I was about to finish die job when Corvan arrived. In the meantime one of the dissidents took a shot at my troops and they killed her."

  Dietrich frowned. "Corvan arrived just in time to broadcast the bastard's dying words. Scary, but no harm done."

  Carla nodded in apparent agreement as she stood and came around to the other side of her fastidiously clean desk. She aimed a remote control at the far wall and pressed a button.

  "Yes, all things considered, a very objective report, and correct in all but one respect. Harm was done."

  A section of the wall slid aside to reveal a holo monitor which faded from black to a robo-cam view of Corvan kneeling over Neely.

  "The public never saw this shot," Carla said by way of explanation. "Corvan's engineer chose the shot provided by his eye cam instead. But our people taped the signal off-air and ran a computer-augmented video analysis of it just to be safe. Here's what they found."

  Dietrich watched a transparent dot appear over a small section of the video, then zoom outward to fill the screen. The engineers had slowed the video so that the frames went by one at a time. Dietrich watched Neely's hand jerk its way toward Corvan's, and there, just before the two hands met, a glimpse of something white.

  Carla triggered a replay and nodded in response to Dietrich's unasked question. "That's right. Neely slipped something into Corvan's hand."

  They both watched the scene jerk by again and fade to black. Carla let the silence build as the monitor disappeared into the wall, and she took her seat.

  Dietrich sighed internally. There was more, and she wanted him to ask, to place himself in the subordinate role. "And?"

  "And," Carla replied, "Neely and Corvan were friends once. That was a long time ago, before Corvan achieved surgical celebrity status and Neely joined the lunatic fringe. And while there's no evidence that they stayed in touch, it's safe to say that Corvan feels sympathetic toward Neely."

  Dietrich scowled. "Sympathetic? Hell, Corvan damned near eulogized the bastard on worldwide television."

  Carla smiled. "A trifle exaggerated perhaps, but yes, his sympathies are with the poor downtrodden masses. As he sees them anyway. According to our psychologists, Corvan has a somewhat compulsive personality. He's fixated on a vision of journalistic purity which he believes will right the world's wrongs. A little gift from his mother, I believe. So, whatever it was that Neely gave him, we can expect Corvan to take it seriously."

  "So what should we do?"

  Carla's long white ringers went up to tug at her right earring. "When you return to your quarters, you'll find that you’ve been detached from the WPO and assigned to my personal staff. I'm going to be busy for the next couple of days, but in the meantime I want you to locate Corvan and find out what Neely gave him. If you decide the situation is dangerous, neutralize the threat. You'll have the WPO and all of our law-enforcement agencies at your disposal. Do what needs to be done."

  Dietrich stood, nodded formally, and left through the side door. He took care to close the door gently behind him.

  3

  Corvan walked out of the terminal's artificial chill and into the roof's blistering heat. Warm air rose in waves that made things shimmer and dance. The Royal Saudi Tower could handle six choppers at a time. A big twin-rotor job took off and showered him with a million pieces of microscopic grit.

  Corvan swore, ducked his head to protect his eye-cam's lens, and headed for a two-place helicopter. It was little more than an airframe with an engine, but would still cost him a small fortune. What with aviation fuel running $225 a gallon, most kinds of transportation were damned expensive. But what the hell, News Network 56 could afford it, and whether they knew it or not, Corvan was still on the job.

  The pilot stepped out of the small patc
h of shade provided by her aircraft and held out a hand for his bag.

  Like most journalists, Corvan thought nothing of climbing into pieces of complicated machinery which he knew very little about and entrusting his life to perfect strangers. Most turned out okay. Still, there were horror stories as well, and you never knew for sure until it was too late.

  Out of self-defense Corvan had developed his own profile, a quick checklist he used to sort the flying fruitcakes from the professional pilots, and thereby extend his life expectancy.

  This one was middle-aged, trim, but going gray. The leather on her dark brown goatskin jacket still looked new where gold eagles had perched, but the rest was fading to gray. And most significant of all, he saw no sign of the temple plug which would allow her to fly by wire.

  A pro then, a regular who was too old to justify the expense of an implant, who had been "released" during a round of "military consolidation." Those were the terms the suits used to describe the process by which national military forces got smaller and the World Peace Organization got larger.

  The pilot closed the luggage compartment and climbed into the left-hand seat. Corvan took his place to her right. As he pulled the door closed, the air conditioning cut in and delivered a blast of cold air into Corvan's face. It felt good and he made no attempt to turn it down.

  "Where to?" The pilot asked the question in the flat, emotionless way of someone who's heard all of the possible answers and simply doesn't care anymore.

  "The Nakasaki Business Complex, please."

  Like the Royal Saudi Tower, the Nakasaki Business Complex was an example of the burgeoning global economy, which, along with almost universal access to satellite television, was giving birth to a homogenized world.

  Given the fact that almost every citizen was economically linked to thousands or even millions of other citizens all over the world through a complex web of interlocked economies, and given the fact that they all had access to the same TV programs, it wasn't hard to see why cultural and religious differences were starting to fade away.

  Some feared the change, suggesting that the human race was turning into a boring porridge of bland automatons. Others welcomed it, pointing out that the more people resemble each other, the less they fight, and holding up the WPO as a shining example of cooperation between nations.

  Corvan wasn't so sure, not if it meant losing the Frank Neelys of the world, and not if it meant the losing his freedom of speech, because as people grow increasingly similar, they also become less tolerant of differing opinions.

  Conscious that his eye cam sometimes bothered people, Corvan gave the pilot what he hoped was a reassuring smile.

  She nodded in return but remained silent. People were like that now, less open, less friendly than during Corvan's childhood.

  As the chopper lifted off, Corvan remembered a recent interview with a famous shrink. She was promoting her latest book and he'd agreed to interview her. As a news story it was pure fluff, but the book was damned good, and he'd come to like her in spite of himself.

  The shrink claimed that the population problem was putting enormous pressure on American culture. She pointed out that for hundreds of years the Japanese had been forced to live in tiny apartments which Americans had considered to be oppressively small. But as the population continued to shoot upward, Americans were growing accustomed to less and less space themselves, and now considered a two-bedroom apartment to be huge.

  The shrink offered this as evidence that Americans were gradually adopting some of the same mechanisms which had allowed various groups of Asians to live together in close proximity for hundreds of years. It involved the ability to see without seeing, to hear without hearing, to be alone in a crowd.

  Looking down through scratched Plexiglas, Corvan decided she was right. People were everywhere, like beetles in a dung heap. They had pushed the Seattle metroplex north to Marysville and south to Tacoma. They had pushed it upward until their buildings touched the sky and downward till the bedrock blocked the way.

  And it wasn't their fault. "Good" medicine, "good" food, "good" transportation, "good" technology, and "good" international relations had led to a "bad" population problem. The result was a quickly deteriorating ecology.

  Oh, the water was still there, as were the forests to the east and west, but these were hanging by a thread, eternally threatened by an excess of everything. Excess people, excess carbon monoxide, excess sewage—the list went on and on. Corvan knew he should feel something, a righteous indignation perhaps, but couldn't muster the energy. The end of the world seems exciting at first, but gets boring after a while.

  As the pilot swung her aircraft into northbound traffic, sunlight flashed off the buildings ahead. Most had mirrored surfaces which converted some of the sunlight to electricity and reflected the rest. And, thanks to the greenhouse effect, there was plenty to reflect.

  Seattle was eight degrees warmer on the average than it had been in the 1990s. The rain the city had once been famous for didn't fall so often anymore. Not in Seattle anyway, although other parts of the world were getting more rain than ever, plus all the problems which went with it.

  But not here. Out in Seattle's wealthier burbs, however, orange trees blossomed, private swimming pools dotted the land, and solar panels winked in the sun.

  Thanks to an atmosphere full of carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and halons, the planet was slowly stewing in its own noxious juices. Because of increased warming, average sea level was six feet higher than it had been twenty years before. Most of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, the Maldives off the west coast of India, and the low-lying keys of the Caribbean were all underwater. One sixth of Bangladesh had disappeared, along with a big chunk of Egypt and important low-lying areas in the United States.

  Galveston, Miami, Myrtle Beach, Ocean City, and Atlantic City had all been evacuated and left to the rising waters.

  In Boston and New York huge seawalls had been erected to keep the ocean out. And everywhere millions of displaced refugees had retreated to higher ground, putting even more pressure on overcrowded cities.

  Corvan smiled. Maybe the Exodus Society was right. Maybe it was time for everyone to leave Earth and ruin some other planet.

  Up ahead, the Nakasaki Business Complex gleamed in the sun and the helicopter started down. The rooftop landing pad quickly grew larger until the runners touched with a gentle thump.

  Corvan gave the pilot a credit card. She slipped it into a reader, the reader made a cellular telephone call to his bank, the bank's computer confirmed that funds were available, and transferred them to the taxi company's account. It all happened so fast that Corvan barely had time to say thank you before the credit card was back in his hand and he was climbing out of the aircraft.

  The lobby was only steps away and wonderfully cool after the rooftop heat. Like most lobbies, this one had been designed to intimidate the casual visitor. It was huge with a soaring cathedral ceiling and the latest in electronic tile work. The tiles were computer controlled and programmed to display thousands of different patterns in sympathy with the canned music which seemed to float downward from some celestial source.

  At the moment the tiles were mimicking the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, an effect which would have been much more impressive if a major subprocessor hadn't failed and blanked out the prophet Isaiah.

  This did nothing to dampen the spirits of the young man who sat behind the fortress of green marble, however. The reception desk was slightly raised, which allowed him to look down on the reop with the expression of a nobleman receiving one of his serfs. In spite of the fact that any voice-interactive computer could have handled the job just as well, a human receptionist is a sign of class, and therefore required by all but the most utilitarian buildings. This one had spiky red hair, a gold ring in his nose, and a temple plug surrounded by a circle of flashing lights.

  The receptionist was a chip head, one of the thousands of men and women who added to their slender incomes b
y accepting a low-order auto-implant and allowing it to record everything they saw and heard.

  The experts estimated that most people were exposed to around two thousand, four hundred advertising impressions each day, counting everything from commercial graffiti to T-shirts to television. So with that many messages vying for attention, it was essential to know which were effective, to what extent, with whom, and for how long.

  With that in mind the three major ratings services each maintained a small army of demographicalfy selected chip heads. Each chip head recorded what they saw, fed it back via a weekly data dump, and collected a check. The information thus gained was analyzed by powerful computers, tabulated, and made available in the form of ratings, not just for radio and television, but for every other form of advertising as well.

  The potential for abuse had always bothered Corvan, who abhorred the idea of someone sifting through other people's lives for information, but knew it wasn't much different from what he did for a living. Besides, the rating services swore that they had elaborate protections in place to protect everyone's privacy, and so far that seemed to be the case.

  The chip head wore a name tag which read "LOUIS PLATERO," and spoke with a calculated insolence. His voice was slightly hoarse. "Yes?"

  Corvan said, "My name's Rex Corvan. I'm here to see an editor named Kim Kio. Where would I find her?"

  Platero looked thoughtful, waiting to see if Corvan would jog his memory with a tip, but thought better of it when the eye cam whirred and the reop zoomed in on his face.

  "She's in the third sub-basement. The elevators are over there."

  Corvan smiled. "Thanks, Lou, I know that was a big strain. Take the rest of the day off."

  The intercom jerked Kim from a deep sleep. There was a terrible taste in her mouth and her bladder was full. "Yeah?"

  The receptionist was a friend of hers, a guy named Louie, and while she'd never said anything about sleeping on prem, he knew. Louie was addicted to his aerosol nicotine dispenser and it caused his voice to sound hoarse. "Rise and shine, sweetcakes. Company's on the way."