Mindkiller

by Spider Robinson

  Hiatus.

  I was sitting at the terminal keyboard, fingers at rest on my lap. I didn’t recall resolving the internal debate, but evidently my subconscious thought it was settled. I even had some idea what I intended to program. Instead I swore, spun the chair around, hugged myself, and folded over until I hit the floor. My mouth was wide open, my teeth clenched tight, my forehead knotted, and I snarled softly in the back of my throat. When I could, I pounded the rug with my fist and wept.

  I hate them. Those sudden gaps in my life, those sudden jump-cuts like slipshod editing, like little bits of tape snipped out of my recording. It must be much like this to have epilepsy, except that I never seem to convulse, or hurt myself while I’m blacked out. Some sort of automatic pilot cuts in; other people rarely even notice. But I resent those missing bits of tape. One of them is six years long.

  It all comes of being careless in jungles, I guess.

  I was pretty used to it by now. I rarely threw that kind of frustration tantrum anymore, never when I was not alone. But I was about to involve myself in something that I could sense was much more dangerous than my average heist, and it was maddening to be reminded that I did not have guaranteed access to my own brains.

  But eventually I had cursed and cried out all the fury and frustration. I got up off the rug and sat back down at the terminal. I had wasted enough time.

  Karen’s credit account showed no activity, either savings or charge, since she had left her apartment to move in with me. She had left my place with enough cash to rent a flop, but she had not yet paid a deposit to a keyboard man. I set up a monitor on her credit, so that when she did pay I would know who she hired. I knew, or knew of, perhaps half the boys in town, and I could locate the rest and pick up her trail. If she paid in advance, as she almost certainly would have to, there was an excellent chance I could “tap the line” and listen in on whatever her operator found out. That would be less dangerous than initiating the probe myself—although more dangerous than simply trying to trail her physically from the site. If her operator did trip a guard program, it might be sophisticated enough to notice me “listening on the extension.” I wondered if it was worth the risk. If I knew what she knew, I could figure the first place she’d go and get there first, be waiting for her. It would be a good argument for taking me on as a partner.

  I realized something and cursed. Karen didn’t have to touch her credit. If no friend was willing to lend her a couple hundred, she would surely know how to locate at least a few of her regular customers. They would be happy to make any requested donation, and they would prefer to use cash. I wasn’t thinking clearly.

  Damn it, that left me flat. There was nothing she had to do that had to appear on tape somewhere in the network. She could get her sightings, pick a target, and skip town without leaving a trace in the system. She couldn’t get through a dragnet, but I am not a dragnet. I could not find Karen if she did not wish to be found, not quickly anyway.

  Perhaps I would after all have to run the inquiry program she had asked me for.

  That decision could be postponed. “If she did not wish to be found…” That was the key. I suddenly recalled the wording of the goodbye message she had scrawled on my toilet seat; she had not written, “Don’t bother to try and come after me.” Could I assume that she was trying to prevent me from trailing her?

  I decided to see how the hand played out. I left my watchdog program monitoring her credit account, wired to light and sound alarms. Any withdrawal or deposit would bring me out of a sound sleep. If she wanted to be found, or didn’t care one way or the other, she’d trip that alarm. If she was actively trying to shake me off, if she hadn’t touched her credit or reentered her apartment within, say, twenty-four hours…well, then I could sit down and decide whether I wanted to catch up with her badly enough to stick my neck out. I told her apartment terminal to notify me if it was used.

  I nodded and got up from my terminal, rotating my head to pop my neck. What’s the next thing to do?

  It was a tight contest between go to sleep and get piefaced drunk. I didn’t feel remotely sleepy, and I didn’t want to answer that alarm drunk or hung over. But finally I was forced to admit that I was so wound up I would probably be more effective hung over. And I might not have to answer any alarm…

  Nor did I. The hangover was somewhere between average and classic. I could find no music that would soothe it. Finally I gave up and took aspirin. It muted the headache and increased the queasiness. I let the Lounger rub my neck for almost an hour, and as my strength came trickling back I used it to get agitated again. After a while I became aware that I had for the past ten minutes been composing variations on the expression “hair of the dog.” Puppy fuzz. Cur fur. Pug rug. Toupé du chien. I said a powerful word out loud and went out for a walk. I knew I would not drink among strangers—and I wanted to go see some people, in the same way that other people infrequently feel like going to the zoo.

  And on the streets I found signs and wonders, things strange and different. I saw a man with one leg walking a dog with three. I saw two women dancing together on the roof of a station wagon; oddly, neither one seemed to be enjoying it. I passed three young toughs in leather and mylar, cheeks tattooed and noses pierced, the oldest of them perhaps fourteen. (This is the first generation of “juvenile delinquents” whose resignation from society is irrevocable. They cannot change their minds when they get older. It will be interesting to see how that works out.) I saw a pimp feeding cocaine to his golden retriever. On a sloping street I saw a short squat ancient woman in a black print dress and babushka stop on the opposite sidewalk, sigh, squat a little more, and begin urinating copiously. A vast puddle gathered at her feet and rushed down the hill. I stood frozen, as though at some personal religious revelation, vouchsafed to me alone. It was not that everyone else on that street ignored the woman. They literally did not see her. People sidestepped the rushing river without noticing it. The hair stood up on the back of my neck and my head throbbed. The old woman urinated for a full minute; then the flood ceased, she straightened, sighed again, and resumed walking uphill, leaving damp footprints of orthopedic shoes. A few minutes later I shook off my trance and resumed my own walk.

  I passed a sidewalk cockfight; noticed that they were betting Old dollars. I passed an alley in which a young whore was on her knees before a cop, paying her weekly insurance premium. He was looking at his watch. I passed six pawnshops in a row, then a political party’s precinct headquarters, then four pornshops in a row. I rounded a corner and nearly tripped over a wirehead sitting on the sidewalk in front of a hole-in-the-wall hardware store.

  He was new to it: the hair had not yet grown in around his droud, and he had obviously just learned the one about wiring in a third battery to produce a threshold overdose. He grinned at me and I saw Karen in his face. I hurried past; almost immediately my stomach knotted and I had to sit down on a stoop with my face in my hands. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the hardware shop proprietor stick his head out of his shop, look around furtively. He bent over the wirehead and extracted his wallet. The boy blinked up at him, grinning, then suddenly understood and roared with laughter. “Right, man,” he said, “square deal,” and he laughed and laughed.

  I found myself walking toward the proprietor with no idea why. He flinched when he saw me, flinched again when he saw my face, then became aggressive. “This man owes me money—you just heard him say so. Mind your own—” He shifted gears, held out the wallet, and said “please,” and then I jacked one up under his ribs, his gut should feel like mine. As he went down and backwards the wallet flew into my hands. I took all the money that was in it and tore it into tiny shreds, tossed the shreds down a sewer. The wirehead laughed and laughed. I threw the wallet in his face and walked away. Behind me I could hear him, ripping up all his identification and photos and giggling.

  I bought a Coke at a dog-stand. It tasted like burned sugar. I used it to wash down four drugstore aspirins and decided to go hom
e and check my alarms. Automatically I took a different route toward home, and so passed something genuinely unique:

  A wirehead shop with a large sign taped in its window saying “FREE SAMPLES.”

  I stopped in my tracks and stared at that sign.

  Free samples? How in God’s name could you give free samples of radical neurosurgery? And what if it were true?

  I entered the shop.

  The shock doc was old and thin and red-nosed. His clothes were baggy everywhere they weren’t shiny. His hands shook at rest. They were almost the only sign of life; his face and eyes looked newly dead. A potential customer was gibbering and gesticulating at him like a speed freak, babbling something about installment plans, and he was not reacting in any way at all, not laughing or anything. Eventually the customer realized he was wasting his time and went for his gun. It was a sure sign that he was stone crazy—was he going to hold a gun on the doc through surgery?—and I started to backflip out the door. But the doc stood his ground; one of those shaking hands shot up and slapped the man, crack, crack, forehand and backhand. They stared at each other over the gun. The excited man was no longer excited, he was quite calm. He put his piece away, spun, and brushed past me on his way out. His expression made me think of Moses traveling away from the Promised Land. When I turned back to the doc he was giving me precisely the same dead stare he had given my predecessor.

  Now I noticed that his other hand was in his pocket. It was not alone in there. He looked me over very carefully before he took it out, empty.

  I was doing my best to look like a man at the very end of his rope; con man’s chameleon reflex. The room helped. Surely to God his operating theater was bright and well lit, but this office-anteroom was dingy and dark and depressing as hell. Unnaturally depressing; I suspected subsonics at high gain. The predominant color was black, and it’s not true that a black wall can’t look dirty. Even the storefront window was blacked over; the only illumination came from a forty-watt bulb on the ceiling. There was no decor. Behind the doc an L-shaped affair that might have been either a counter or a desk grew out of the wall, a chair on either side. One had to pass the thing to get to the door that must lead to the operating theater. On the opposite side of the doorway from the desk was a tall steel cabinet with a good lock. A black box sat on top of the desk, and connected to it by telephone cord was what looked like an oversized black army helmet.

  I shuffled my feet. “I, uh…good, uh…”

  “You saw the new sign and you want to ask me some questions,” he said. His voice was flat, sepulchral. “That sign is going to make me rich.”

  I have known cripples and cops and killers, people who must learn how to get numb and stay that way, and I have never met anyone remotely so inhuman as that man. It was impossible to picture him as a child.

  “I, uh, always understood there was no way to…”

  “Until this year that was correct,” he agreed. “It still can’t be done anywhere but here. Yet. The device that makes it possible is my own invention.” He displayed no visible sign of pride. Or, for that matter, shame.

  “How does it, uh…?”

  “It is based on inductance principles. I do not intend to discuss it further. My patent application went in this week; that sign has only been up for an hour.”

  “Well, but I mean, how would I…” I trailed off.

  He stared at me for a long time, hands shaking. “Step over there against that wall. Behind the sonoscope.”

  Hesitantly, heavily, I obeyed. The sonoscope looked just like the one in every emergency room, rather like an old fluoroscope, except that the face of the display had a fine-mesh grid inscribed on it. I stood in the proper spot while he candled my head with ultrasonics. He grunted at his first look. “Trauma there. And there.”

  I nodded. “War wound.”

  “Hold your head still. I will have to offset the droud a bit—”

  “Hey, listen,” I interrupted, “I’m not sure I’m going to do this. I just—”

  His shoulders slumped a little more. “Of course. The sample first. This way.”

  He led me to the desk counter, sat me down, and went around behind it. He made three adjustments to the black box, one to the inside of the “army helmet.” He passed it to me. “Put this on. That way front.”

  I eyed it dubiously.

  He did not sigh. “When I activate this unit, it will set up a localized inductance field in the area where I calculate your medial forebrain bundle to be. For a period of five seconds you will experience intense pleasure. The effect will be almost precisely half as strong as that produced by a conventional droud from standard house current.”

  “What if my medial thing isn’t where everybody else’s is?”

  “That is unlikely. If so, the most probable result would be that you would feel nothing, and I would recalibrate and try again.”

  “What about least probable? Are there any potentially dangerous near-misses?”

  “Not lethal ones, no. There is a chance, which I compute as less than five percent, that you might experience a feeling of either intense heat or intense cold. If so, tell me and I’ll disconnect.”

  “This thing has been tested a lot?” I temporized. “I mean, you said your patent thing just went in this week.”

  “Exhaustively tested, by me, for a year at Bellevue.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Volunteers?”

  “Mental patients.” No, in other words.

  I kept on looking at the damned helmet.

  What was I doing here? Research? Investigating the subject of Karen’s crusade, so that I could understand it better, understand her better? What was to be gained here that was worth sticking my head into a giant homemade light socket?

  Was it really that tempting? To know pure pleasure for once, for just this once, to let go all the way and find out what happens when you let go? If I did let go, could I find my way back?

  “Doctor, do you consider conventional wireheading addictive?”

  He didn’t flinch. “Yes.”

  “Is this addictive?”

  “No.”

  “Is it habituating?”

  “It can’t be. One free sample per customer. I am not a candy store.”

  I had a thought. “Can you cut it back to one-quarter droud strength?”

  “Yes. That would still be your only sample.”

  Still I waited and debated. He was making no slightest effort to influence my decision either way, or to hurry it along. He was dead. I thought of Karen in the harsh light of her living room lamp, and of the young wirehead I had left shredding his identification. I thought of what Karen wanted to do. She wanted to commit financial and/or physical violence on the people who ran this industry. She wanted to abolish this practice. I intended to try and con her out of it. I had to know what it was like.

  I put my hands on the helmet, and I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what ecstasy would feel like, and—

  Hiatus.

  I was halfway out of my chair, rising, spinning toward the door, all in slow motion. The helmet was in mid-bounce. Just before the shock doc’s face slid out of my peripheral vision, I thought I saw the mildest, most feeble trace of relief flicker across it. I was conscious of every muscle-action of running toward the exit. Someone was screaming; I didn’t know his name. My time sense was so stretched out that I was able to open the door at a dead run, leaning out to pull it towards me, yanking my torso back away from it as it opened, pivoting on the handle so that I flung myself into the street. I hit the pavement feet first, perfectly banked for my turn; after three skidding steps I had my stride back and within ten I was settled into it. Shortly I had to brake for a busy intersection. As I did, my time sense suddenly snapped back to normal. I sat down on the curb, rushing traffic a meter from my shoes, and bent over and puked and puked into the gutter. The nausea lasted, off and on, through four or five light-changes. When it passed I sat there for another couple, and then I heard cat feet approaching and lo
oked up to see who was desperate enough to roll a drunk in broad daylight. So I happened to be looking in the direction of the wireshop, a full block behind me, when its front wall danced across the street, hotly pursued by brightness intolerable, and struck the vacant storefront opposite like some monstrous charge of Brobdingnagian buckshot.

  I flung myself back and sideways, away from traffic and into blast shadow, and the sound reached me as my face hit the pavement. I stayed down until it seemed like everything that was in the air had landed, then rolled to my feet fast.

  My would-be mugger was glancing back and forth from me to the smoking wreckage, clearly of two minds. I put my hand on my gun butt. “Not today,” I said, and he licked his lips and sprinted for the shop. He had delayed too long; five or ten people were already gingerly entering the store, wrapping various things around their hands so they wouldn’t burn their fingers. They were a gang; two of them stood guard.

  I joined the rest of the crowd. We stayed a half-block away on either side and stared and cursed the looters for getting there first and swapped completely bogus eyewitness reports. I decided it probably had not been an accidental explosion. It had taken artistry and skill to place a charge that would utterly wreck the wireshop without bringing down the floors above or seriously damaging the adjoining buildings. God is an iron, but He is seldom that finicky in his irony. That left me in three simultaneous states of mind. I was impressed. I was scared. And, strongest of all—

  I was enormously intrigued.

  I made my way home quickly, and when I smiled at President Kennedy he winked his left eye. I had a guest. One that Kennedy had recognized and admitted, or he would have winked both eyes several times. I am allergic to surprises, and never more so than that afternoon. My first thought was that anyone smart enough to crack my house was smart enough to tell the President which eye to wink. I wondered why I had never thought of that. I pulled my gun and made sure the collar wasn’t in the way of the knife and told myself that it was purest paranoia to think the wireshop bombing could have anything to do with me. The hypothesis yielded a bomber of infinite resources, great ingenuity, and complete incompetence. More likely my guest was the Fader, who was about due. Or Old Jake, come with his guitar to play me a new song…