Mindkiller

by Spider Robinson

  “Nice old duck,” she said when the door had closed behind him. “I get the funny feeling maybe I…frightened him away somehow. I’m sorry if I did, that music was nice.”

  “You’re the sorriest thing I’ve seen all day,” I said. “What did you buy us for dinner, and why aren’t you pouring it?”

  “Whups.” She left and came back with whiskey and cashews and raisins. “I’m cooking stew.”

  “The hell you say.”

  “God damn it, Joe. I know I’m no good with a microwave. My folks were too poor to have micro. But you’ve got that old-fashioned stove that still works in there, and a perfectly good pressure cooker, and that’s what I learned at my mother’s knee. So shut up and wait till you taste it before you—”

  “All right, all right, I’ll take a chance.”

  She found the Fader’s joint on the rug, which thank heaven is burnproof, and looked up inquiringly. I nodded, and she toked it back to life. After two or three deep puffs, she set it down on what we still call an “ashtray” even though it’s been years since cigarettes or joints produced ashes, probably because “buttrest” seems indelicate. “Hey, Joe. Guess what? I think I figured out what I want to do when I grow up.”

  I sat up straighter and felt myself smiling. “Tell me about it.” It was the best news I’d had in a long while. I hadn’t been sure whether her meditation was helping or hurting her.

  “You remember that conversation we had back at my place, back on Day One? About joy? As distinguished from pleasure?”

  “Sure.”

  “So there’s two kinds: the kind from doing a good thing, and the kind from passing up a real tempting chance to do a bad one. The second kind’s easy. It is really tempting to go back to the life, the money’s fabulous—and it’s giving me great joy not to, because the life is a bad thing.”

  “You don’t rationalize that it’s therapeutic for the customers?”

  “If acting out aggression drained it, there’d be fistfights before football games instead of after. I did my customers no favor, and I charged ’em plenty for it.

  “But dumping that is only a kind of negative joy. I’ve been looking for a good thing to do. Something really worthwhile, something to benefit the world in a significant way, and commensurate with my talents and background.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, that’s the hard part. I’ve never learned how to do anything really useful except fuck and fix motorcycles, and I can’t go back to bikes because I can’t stand working on the junk they make nowadays. Besides, the existence of motorcycles in good running order isn’t all that great a boon to mankind. I figure I can do better than that.”

  “I’m sure of it,” I agreed. “What have you selected?”

  “Well, I got to thinking about this socket in my skull. I got to thinking about people who have ’em put there, and why. Self-destruction’s too quick an answer. I’ve been over it in my head a lot, and I can’t be certain, but I think if that option hadn’t been there—if there hadn’t been a friendly neighborhood wireshop all of six blocks away—if wireheading hadn’t come along and presented itself, I do not think I would have just found some other way to suicide. Other than tobacco and a risky lifestyle, I mean.

  “I mean, I don’t think dying is what I wanted at all. I don’t think hardly any of the people the juice has killed wanted to die, as such, exactly. I think we just…just wanted to have it all, just for once, just for a little while to have it all and not be hungry anymore. And if dying was the ticket price, well, okay.”

  I wasn’t certain I agreed, but then I’d never asked a wirehead’s opinion. Very few people ever get to. I remembered the great lengths she had gone to with the water bottle to prolong her own last ride as far as possible.

  “So it seems to me, now, that the existence of that option is an evil thing. An attractive nuisance, like the swimming pools and old refrigerators little kids get into. It makes it so that people past a certain point of instability are unbearably tempted. Maybe I’m rationalizing, trying to shift some blame for what I did from myself.”

  She finished her drink and lit a Peter Jackson, masking the last fragrances of the Fader’s joint. “So what I’d like to do is everything I can to remove that option.”

  I sat there trying not to frown. “How, exactly?”

  “I haven’t exactly got detailed plans yet—”

  “Phone your congresscritter? Write a letter to The Village Voice? Shoot every wire-surgeon in town?”

  “The shock docs don’t matter one way or another. They’d just as soon be botching abortions and faking draft deferments. It’s the corporations that make and market the hardware that are the real villains.”

  “Anybody can put together a juice rig.”

  “The wire and transformer, sure—but the droud itself, the microfilaments and the technology to place them properly, that’s not workbench stuff. Without the corporations, wireheading just wouldn’t happen.”

  “Do you have any idea how many corporations are involved?” I asked sarcastically. I had no firm idea myself.

  “Three.”

  “Nonsense. There have to be at least—”

  “Three. The shock doc I picked took it out in trade, and he felt talkative afterward. I didn’t think I was listening at the time, but I was. There are over a dozen juice-rig models on the market, but they all get their basic modules from one of three corporations. There used to be five, but two of them went under. And the doc said he had his eyes and ears open, and he had a hunch that two of the three were really different arms of a single outfit that nobody knows.”

  “How could a juice-head company go broke?”

  “How should I know? Sampling the merchandise, maybe. Anyway, all the basic patents are held by a Swiss outfit, so that makes a total of three targets and four avenues of approach.”

  “Infiltrate and destroy, huh?”

  “Something like that. Free-lance industrial espionage.”

  “I repeat, what’s your plan? See how many executives you can poison before they get you?”

  “I thought of it,” she admitted.

  “Pointless and stupid. Honey, you start in killing sharks, they just start showing up faster than you can kill them.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not why I gave up the idea. I don’t think I’ve got it in me to kill.”

  That impressed me. Most of the children of television are convinced that they have in them what it takes to murder in cold blood. The overwhelming majority of them are wrong. Surprisingly few have what it takes to murder in hot blood, or even self-defense. “Congratulations.”

  “But there are other ways. There’s no such thing as an honest corporation. A hooker often learns things, without even trying, that the IRS would love to know. Or the Securities and Exchange Commission. Or the Justice Department, or—”

  “Or Newsday, right. They pay the best, you might as well get a terrific coffin out of the deal. I’m certainly glad to hear that you have no death-wish.”

  “I’m not especially afraid of death. Not anymore. Someday, no matter what I do, random chance is going to strike me dead. I might as well be doing something worthwhile at the time. It should be a shame that I died.”

  “It sure will be. Karen, the kind of people you’re talking about have all the access they could over want, and more leverage than you can believe. There is no way you can sell that kind of information and not be traced. Hell, they’ll be able to follow the path of the check.”

  “I won’t sell the information, then. I’ll give it away.”

  “Don’t be silly. Who’d trust free information?”

  “But I could—”

  “Damn it to hell, listen to me. I was professionally trained to infiltrate and destroy once, by experts. I’ve been on the con for a long time now, and I have a unique advantage you don’t share. I can’t be traced. If my life depended on it, I wouldn’t get within a hundred miles of a scam like this. With a crack team of about a dozen, and an unli
mited bankroll, you could maybe put a big bruise on people like that and live to admire it. No way is anybody going to bring them down. Let alone a single commando, let alone a crusading hooker with a hole in her head. Get serious, will you—”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  I am not used to being outshouted. I hadn’t even known I was shouting.

  “Don’t talk down to me! I don’t care how old you are, don’t talk down to me. I’m sick of that shit. I don’t have to listen to that. I have been around, chump. I’ve been in on enough scams to know what I can do. I’m pretty smart and I’m pretty tough, and I don’t scare worth a damn. God damn it, I’ve been hooking for almost a year in this town and nobody owns me. I’m a fucking independent, do you know that? Do you know what that means?”

  Of course I did—but I had never thought it through, never considered the cleverness and strength it implied. She saw me working it out and grinned. “There’s a sucker out on the street now with three new creases on his face. One that I put there, and two from worrying about where I might put the next one. Joe, I know the way things are. I know this job is too big for me, and I expect to enjoy it right up to the end, and I don’t need any lectures. Oh, Jesus, the stew!”

  She leaped up and galloped to the kitchen. I sat there with my empty glass, listened to the squeal and hiss and clatter of the silly obsolete pressure cooker, listened to oh-shit noises turn to dubious mmms and finally to mollified nnns and a last triumphant ha.

  Once I blew a radiator hose on the highway. A Good Samaritan stopped to help me. He acted very knowledgeable about cars. While I was getting the spare hose out of the trunk, he helpfully topped off my transmission fluid for me. With the brake fluid I kept behind the right headlight. “Oh, it’s all the same stuff,” he assured me. “They just put in different dyes and charge you more money.” It took me three days to get a tranny shop to flush and refill the system, and for those three days the transmission slipped so badly that I nearly went crazy. The engine would roar smoothly in response to the accelerator, while the car crept along in fits and starts as it slipped in and out of gear. It was a helpless, frustrated feeling. I had all the horsepower in the world, and it took me two city blocks to coax her up to thirty.

  At the moment that was the inside of my head. High revs, but it wouldn’t go anywhere. I attributed it to the pot smoke I had breathed. The thought train went like so:

  (I’m much too agitated.) (Well, sure I am, my new friend is planning something dangerous and stupid.) (No, there’s more to it than that.) (Something else?) (Yes.) (What else?) (…my new friend is planning something dangerous and stupid.) (No, there’s more to it than that.) (What else?) (…my new friend is planning…)

  Pull back on the accelerator and try again.

  (Why must there be something else?) (Because I’m much too agitated.) (Why?) (Because my new…)

  Same loop. Try again.

  (Why do I feel my agitation is “too much”?) (Because if I were only concerned about my friend, I’d be trying to persuade her to drop her plans.) (And…?) (And getting agitated is the wrong way to persuade her.) (Sure?) (Yes; it will only strengthen her resolve.) (Conclusion?) (I’m not really trying to talk her out of it.) (What am I doing, then?) (Getting very agitated.) (Why?) (My new friend is planning something…)

  Christ.

  The aroma of stew struck like a symphony, disrupting the inner loop. I heard silverware being assembled, bowls being ladled full. I saw the cigarette she had left burning give one last puff of smoke and expire. Stop the brain, put it away, maybe after dinner…

  (What should I be doing?) (Talking her out of it.) (How?) (By going along with the gag.) (By—?) (Wait for her own doubts to emerge, wait for her to falter—and she will—and then nudge.) (Con my friend?) (That, or stubborn her up and send her out there alone. There’s no third choice.) (I can’t do that.) (Why not?) (It’s dangerous.) (What do you mean, dangerous?) (It makes me very agitated.) (Why?) (My new friend is planning to…)

  (I’m trying to talk myself out of it!)

  She brought two bowls into the room, and the symphony of smells crescendoed. She put them on the coffee table, left, and reentered with a jug and two glasses. She poured for us. She left again for garlic-and-butter-toasted French bread, and then she sat opposite me. I started to dig in.

  “Joe? It should cool a little first.”

  “Right.”

  “Look…I just did some thinking. I had no call to blow up at you that way, no right. It’s just that you came on kind of…paternal, and you’re about forty.” That made me wince. In my head I’m twenty-eight. “About the same age as he was when…I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

  “I’m sorry I yelled too. I don’t know why I did.”

  We ate the stew. It was superb, and I told her so.

  “Joe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look, you’ve done an awful lot for me. You saved my life, you put me—”

  “Please.”

  “—back together again, let me say it, you gave me this place to come to and a warm bed every night, you never ask when I’m gonna get it together and do something, you give me all this and I give you bupkiss.”

  “My ass. I got all your cash and a terrific pair of speakers.”

  “You’re a good man, Joe, and only a selfish bitch would ask you for anything more.”

  “The way you’re about to?”

  “The way I’m about to.”

  I tried to sigh, but a belch spoiled it. “Ask away, honey. Your stew has softened my heart.”

  “Your terminal has just about all the access there is. I want you to get me readings on all my targets.”

  The fear was back, a muffled yammering in a distant compartment of my skull.

  “Just give me a deep reading of each one. That’s all. I’m not asking you to come in on the scam. It’s not personal with you, it’s not your crusade. But you could save me weeks of legwork—maybe months.”

  “I’m sorry, Karen. I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  (Why not?) “The kind of information you’re talking about is ringed around with alarms, tricky ones. If I trip one, a tracer program could start hunting me back.”

  “So what? You don’t exist, not on tape.”

  “Exactly. How come you’re still an independent? Forget about how tough and smart you are—what’s the main reason?”

  She frowned. “Well…my johns don’t talk much. Not even to their best friends.”

  “Bullseye. How long do you think you’d last in this town if The Man heard about you and decided he could use you? A couple of gentlemen would call on you, and when they were done you’d be terribly, terribly anxious to do any little thing that might please them. Now suppose that you’re a big-time corporate shark. The kind whose attention The Man himself tries not to attract. Somebody tries to crack your shields, and when you investigate you discover that the interloper has no legal existence. Could you not find uses for such a person? Important uses? Would it not be worth a lot of time and trouble to track him down and enslave him? Honey, I continue to exist as an independent for the same reason you do, or anybody else with something special to offer. The bastards haven’t noticed me yet. Should I stick my nose in their window and start sniffing?”

  We both listened to the argument as it came out of my mouth. It convinced her, and it should have convinced me. My subconscious had done a good job on it. It was a pretty good argument, with only a couple of holes in it, and it was indeed something to be afraid of. But it wasn’t what I feared. I could tell.

  But she bought it. She didn’t even bother poking at the holes in the logic to see what I had them stuffed with. If a good friend doesn’t want to do you a favor, there’s no point in arguing.

  “I guess you’re right. I hadn’t thought it through.” She sat crestfallen for a moment, then squared her shoulders. “Well, there are other keyboard men in town.”

  “Sure. Professionals with equipment almost as good as mine. Bett
er connected, better protected. But Karen…listen, no matter how you go about this, it’s suicide city, I’m telling you. Give it up.”

  “Two weeks ago I was willing to die just to find out what pleasure was like.”

  “If all you want is a socially useful kamikaze mission, just stop paying off your draft board. You’ll be on the New York police force the next day, and stiff in the South Bronx before the year is out.”

  “And chase guys like you? And chippies like me? Don’t be silly. Look, I’ve got to piss—you stay here till I get back. Surprise dessert in the kitchen.” She leaped up and was gone.

  I sat there trying to figure out what I was really afraid of.

  It was astonishingly, frustratingly difficult. I knew that the answer was in my possession, that some part of my mind held the knowledge. I could even tell in what “direction” that part lay. But every time I steered that way and gave her the gas, the transmission slipped. It could run away faster than I could pursue. Stubbornly, hopelessly, I stalked it, knowing only that it tasted like nightmares.

  Something yanked me out of my brown study; the outside world was demanding my attention. But why? Everything looked okay. I smelled nothing burning, all I heard was the distant sound of Karen urinating…

  I played back tape, and discovered that I had been hearing that sound for an impossibly long time.

  I didn’t even bother to run. She had found a small length of hose under the sink, and used adhesive tape to run a siphon from the toilet tank, to simulate the sound of urination. Then she had left, by the second of my two emergency exits. The one I had not told her about. On the face of the lid she had left a lipstick message: “Enjoy the speakers, Joe. I’m glad that fucker landlord didn’t get them. Thanks for everything.”

  I nodded my head. “You’re welcome,” I said out loud. I went to the kitchen, made a pitcher of five-to-one martinis, frowned, dumped it in the sink, made a pitcher of six-to-one martinis, nodded and smiled, brought it into the living room, and hurled it carefully through the television screen. Then I rummaged in the ashtray for the Fader’s roach, and got three good deep tokes out of it before I burned my lip. I had not smoked in many years; it smacked me hard.