Silver Screen

by Justina Robson

  Halfway towards them a figure stepped out and caught my arm. I looked angrily into his face, a rude rebuff halfway up my throat. It was Tito Belle, one of the discredited and demoted outcasts from the 899 fiasco.

  His face had aged dramatically in the last two years since I had seen his picture. Where once only fine lines had crossed his tan now there were crevasses and a small gulch down either side of his mouth. When he spoke, the smell of gin was immediate. “I saw the lovely Maria coming over,” he said, nodding towards her where she perched on a folding chair, listening to Mori. “I expect she's warned you off talking to the newspeople? Or here to stop you?”

  “I haven't seen any media people except at the demo at the station,” I said honestly, before I had time to think of what he wanted or if it was smart to say anything to him. He was still very much persona non grata in technical circles.

  “No. Well. Better than I thought at keeping them away,” he said. A spasm of vagueness crossed his face, which was instantly recognizable to me as the expression of someone with an implant listening to an information download. “Anyway, just watch yourself. Bad business, getting put out at the front of things.”

  I was privately astonished that he retained the implant. Security procedures following the accident ought to have entailed its removal. The common story was of his being demoted to sub-AI management. But he must still be doing something more than that for the Company if the direct interface remained there. Thinking this and catching his eye, I thought that he had meant to show me it.

  “Yes,” I said and started to move away. “If you'll excuse me…”

  “No.” He put his hand out, then snatched it back and looked around him. “I mean very dangerous. Not your career. Forget that; it's over. Watch yourself. This is a big story here on Earth now, a lot of weight in it on all sides. 899 was nothing—a hiccup. Now we're in the maelstrom.” He drew back suddenly and moved off into the cluster of earthside employees he had emerged from.

  “Jools,” Maria said from behind me before I had time to move.

  I turned.

  She smiled and put a gentle and placatory hand on my arm. With her other hand she held out a fresh glass of gin, almost full. “You must feel dreadful. For medicinal purposes.”

  I took the glass. Behind Maria's shoulder Richard Mori's face was grim. He was clearly unhappy at being the focus of the dark glances emanating from the steadily chewing faces of the extremist brigade on the far side of the room.

  “Nice to see Tito and so many old faces here,” Maria said, and jinked her weight over onto one leg, resting the other. She was directly between me and Augustine, looking for my reaction, testing.

  The old cow.

  “Yes,” I said, “isn't it?” I wasn't sure exactly when we had changed from being simply antagonistic to assuming outright opposing sides, but we were there now. For all that I despised her in so many ways, this realization made a quiver of fear manifest inside me. Now that there were sides, how many were with her and how many with me? Plus, although most of my agreeing with her had always been pretend, now it was more important to play along as usual and keep it looking just the same. Guilt swamped me and I felt my face heat up. I was out of my depth. I took a gulp of gin.

  “Nice chat with Jane?” she enquired.

  “Oh, just old times, you know—” I cursed myself. “You know.” It was as good as lying straight to her face. Now she knew that I knew her game. I struggled to find a way out of the conversation. Couldn't think of anything. Outside the wind threw some rain against the windows. The muted sounds of talking had all but died out around us.

  Maria smiled the sweet, condescending smile of victory and patted my shoulder. “Well, you have a nice time at home on your leave. I have to get back for a meeting now. You will call me if you need anything, won't you, hun-bun?”

  I nodded wordlessly and she left. Mori shadowed her. As he passed me, he rolled his eyes and cut his throat with his finger. He'd rather die than have to spend another shuttle flight with Van Doorn. I wondered how difficult it would be to get her fired. Or get myself fired before it was too late. Maybe Mori would crack and throw her out an airlock, or stone her to death with the in-flight wholemeal dinner rolls, and save me the trouble.

  The gin went to my legs. I was dying to sit down when I reached Lula and forced my way onto half of her wooden picnic chair. It creaked ominously under both of us, but held. By this time Augustine had given in to curiosity and gone to renew old acquaintance with the loony-tunes. I watched his back as it twitched in animated discussion with the beards and beads. Slowly their conversation drew more members. Soon the entire gaggle was gathered, intent. I wondered what on earth they were talking about in such whispers. They smiled and pointed and drew close to examine something he was showing them on his hand-pad.

  I call them mad. They aren't.

  I call them that to prevent myself feeling the jealousy I used to feel whenever they came around to the flat and loitered with the curtains drawn, passionately discussing how to arrange the independence of machines: machine parks, reserves, the funding of their needs for fuel and ore, the setting up of charities for homeless washing machines, and warehouses for the shelter and repair of junked and otherwise abused toasters, razors, dishwashers, and garbage disposals—and computers, of course. They laughed a lot. In between the laughing they got themselves employed by top technological manufacturers and raked in enough money to finance their ideas themselves. Now they were mostly out of the corporate loop.

  As an employee of OptiNet it was my duty to view them as officially eccentric entrepreneurs. During their conversation with Augustine they cast some long, questioning glances in my direction, and I wondered if it would be any easier to talk to them now than it had been then. They had pursued their dreams and were working their purposes out. I had never had a vision like that. All I had was my giant mental inventory and an enviable position working with the most advanced AI system in the world. I was sure they always had—and still—thought of me as a type of freak occurrence, an idiot, a set of talents and situations wasted on a person without focus.

  “What's the matter with you?” Lula nudged me. She looked cross.

  “Oh, nothing. I was just looking at Augustine there and wondering why I never joined in the revolution.”

  “Well, if they're the revolution, then I vote for exile,” she said. “Give us a swill of that gin.”

  I gave her the glass and she took a big drink with her face screwed up. “Ugh, where did they get this from? Trust Roy to keep it cheap. Anyway, what are we hanging around here for? Let's go back to yours and have something decent.”

  “I'm waiting to see what the wicked fairy does,” I said, nodding to where Jane was making it tough-going for one of her aunts or whatever.

  “She isn't going anywhere this side of the boredom nonevent horizon,” Lula insisted and got up. I had to leap to my feet. The chair clattered onto its side. For a split second everyone looked at us. My face went beet red and I quickly picked up the chair and set it straight. Lula put the gin back and waved at Augustine. We walked out into the gloom of the porch.

  Through the doorway we looked across the drenched garden and towards the road. Our taxi had made it to a spot not far away, moving closer as cars dwindled. Without hesitation we plunged out towards it and collapsed into the soft greys of its warm interior. When Augustine finally arrived in the front seat with a great gust of wet, chilly air, the taxi registered a full complement of passengers and set off immediately towards Leeds and my home.

  “I heard about the trial on the news,” my brother said, placing the tea-tray carefully upon the table before sitting down. The smell of the tea mingled with the scent of lubricants from the open door, where the small lounge went through into the back room and Ajay's bike-repair shop. I hadn't been home for almost a year and was still occupied with looking around me and taking stock of the place, trying to feel my way back to its old comfort and security.

  “We didn't
think it would go this far,” I said, “but now that it has they want me to be the expert witness.” I noticed he had rearranged my mother's collection of resin-cast deities and put our parents' photographs into a more prominent position on the shelf. Mother smiled in the shade of a Calcuttan jacaranda, visiting her own family. Dad sat in the armchair Lula was in now, looking cheerful and perplexed at the same time. It had been taken when he was out of work, just before he moved away to New York to become an apprentice stonemason at the age of fifty-one. Some people will still pay for human work instead of machine. They claim the imperfections make it more artistic. He could never sit and do nothing.

  “Do you think Roy would have killed himself if he had known that his submission for trial had been successful?” Ajay was saying, clearly misinformed by the newscasts. I was not about to disabuse him. He handed me a mug of tea—Piglet mug.

  “I don't know,” I lied, “but he would have been frightened when he realized how much opposition the Company would be prepared to put up to the idea.” The tea was perfect: hot and sweet. Lula added more sugar. Augustine blew on his like a small horse. He seemed to have put on some weight—but he was always big so it may have been my imagination. I smiled at him.

  “Nobody investigates very much these days,” Ajay observed, “except on the television. They're very good at it there. Their success rate verges on the supernatural. I find them too fiendishly clever most of the time.” He was grinning and watching me, wry, his face wrinkling like a monkey's. “Do you watch them?”

  I shook my head and scowled at him, but he only laughed. He knew. Maybe I had one of those faces that gives everything away.

  “They always get their man,” he continued and blew into his tea, “like the Mounties. Do they still have Mounties? They seem to be such a good idea.”

  “In Canada,” I said.

  They all laughed.

  “What?”

  But nobody would tell me.

  “Roy was in trouble before the trial anyway,” Augustine offered. “Under a lot of pressure from the Company to cease all communication with his green friends and all the other people he subscribed to.”

  “Those people at the funeral?” I asked.

  Augustine shrugged. “Among others. They were all very upset that Roy was dead. They didn't expect it. Nobody said anything about having made plans with him, but I got the impression that he was involved in something they were doing.” He paused and looked into his tea. “It's funny, but nobody said anything much about liking Roy. I thought Jane was going to do a eulogy, or that there would have been a service of some kind. It didn't seem right just shoving him into the ground and reading that message. I know he was a pain, but I did like him. We were friends. That all got brushed aside somehow.”

  We were all quiet. I had a lot of conflicting feelings. To me the funeral seemed so unreal. Because of the game, I was still involved with Roy and it didn't really feel like he was dead. I said something to that effect, and found I could hardly speak for a lump in my throat. Augustine got up from his armchair and sat next to me. Lula sighed a long sigh.

  I wished I could tell them about the flour and the fact that I suspected more was going to be appearing from Roy's plot than grass and daisies, but I stopped myself. Tito's odd behaviour was particularly memorable at that second. It wasn't fair to implicate the others any further. We kept a minute of silence for Roy.

  “The consciousness thing,” Ajay said, changing the subject. “Isn't it peculiar that we've come to make a trial out of it when we spend so long ascribing consciousness to things that haven't got it at all? Talking to the cat and the house and my socket set, and all the time feeling safe because we're so sure they aren't really listening. Or that they listen so very well. I mean, yes, let them listen. Who needs a response? We're all satisfied just to talk. But still in control. Always, ourselves, in control. Listening to nobody.” As he spoke a narrow brindle cat had come into the room. Kali, my mother's adopted stray, still fond of shredding the curtains, as I had observed. He put his hand down and rubbed his fingertips together to attract her and she wandered over and let him pick her up. He glanced at me. “So, what are you going to say?”

  “Oh my God,” I said, “I don't know. The whole thing is the most stupid mess. Ajay, if you had ever spoken to 901 you would know it was not a response automaton—some thing. It's preposterous to argue about whether it is conscious. Of course it's conscious. Anyway, the argument isn't about that. It's that OptiNet is worried they can't control it any more. They've been working in an underground way around this thorn for quite some time, but bloody Roy had to go and force it up into the open so that now there's no chance.”

  “Yes,” Ajay said, stroking the cat with one hand, tea in the other. “I liked it much better when technology went on out of the public eye. Nowadays they say you get to see the truth, but it seems like just a better way of making more lies. It was on the news this afternoon. Some chap from your company was saying how great 901 was, how we couldn't live without it, but that it was beyond our grasp now, a possible danger. Not in so many words. But that's what he meant.”

  “Public Enemy Number One,” Lula said. She lifted her feet up and tucked them under her, almost vanishing into the crushed Dralon depths where my father had created a deep rabbit scrape in the dim and distant. She cradled her cup and blew the steam away from her nose. “I wonder if it will be only the madmen or if there will be some kind of mass demonstrations. It's only two years since the Keffer Virus had them all out in gasmasks and placards.”

  “This is hardly a public-health threat,” I said, alarmed. All too well her words had conjured the images of hundreds and thousands of government-housing families living in freshly sprung cardboard cities in the subways of London, on Liverpool's docks, in the parks of all the large cities who had spent so lavishly upon the first beautiful biobuildings. Oak, ash, beech, and cedar, all had suppurated and rotted under the virulent insect-borne plague released by a criminal gang attempting to hold the country to ransom. “There are more biobuildings now than ever,” I said hopefully, when the immediacy of the memories had gone.

  “Oh yes,” she said, nodding, “so there are,” and she gave me a knowing look like a little witch. “But not before the terrorists were rooted out and shot, my dear. And they lost plenty of lives in that debacle.” She glanced at Ajay and Augustine, who were looking at her with puzzlement. “Ah, did I say shot? I meant permanently contained.”

  “Hmm.” On Ajay's lap the cat was motionless, her eyes closed in ignorant content. I envied her. “Clay-grown towns,” he said. “Photosynthetic roofs, solar-collecting glass, water-purifying guttering…all so very normal. Talking houses. Driverless cars. I think if 901 looked like a person then who would care? We'd forget. But a mass of circuits: no face, no body. It doesn't even have a proper name. You could call it Charley. That would be a start.”

  “It's too late to bloody start!” I snapped at him. “This is not a public relations exercise. They mean to kill it, don't you understand?”

  They all looked at me in shock. Even the cat opened her eyes. I was shocked myself. I felt a fool and for the first time that day thought I might cry. I tried not to. It was stupid. It probably wouldn't happen like that at all. Augustine put his arm around me, but I couldn't help twitching away from it defensively. He left it there anyway.

  “If the Company wins,” he said, “then the machine-greens end up even less of an influence than before. But they can't afford to lose 901, either. They may try to break it up, but if it goes down they don't have enough subunits to carry the load.” He was trying to be comforting. I held my tongue.

  “The world can live without OptiNet,” Ajay said, confounding things. “But OptiNet can't live without 901.”

  Lula said nothing.

  “Although,” Ajay added, “if the Company loses and human rights equivalents must be assigned to higher computer intelligences, then they may be held to ransom. Plus, officially admitting them as human or even
animal equals will cause a lot of trouble. I would expect some serious attempts to destroy them. After all, they must want to rule the world. And they could.”

  Lula cleared her throat. “I don't think they would want that at all.”

  “Well, what would they want?” Ajay asked.

  I hesitated before speaking. Roy was the one who should answer this.

  “It's foolish to think of machine intelligences wanting the same things as human beings,” I said. “If they have wants, they won't be the same as ours. We got ours from being flesh and blood, genes and culture. They aren't like that. They…” But I didn't know what to say. All of the intelligences were programmed to relate to human beings. Trying to throw out all of that and imagine what they would be like if left to their own devices left my imagination blank. Left to their own devices, they wouldn't have come into existence in the first place, and when they did it was at a human whim, in a human way. They were part of our mental landscape and therefore perhaps prone to some of our physically ordained impulses as well. There was no need to state the obvious. We all knew this already. Machine minds stripped of reference to humans would be so alien they might not produce any thoughts we could even recognize, let alone think on.

  “A decision also means that we've decided about what consciousness really is,” Lula said. “If the Company wins, then it stays nebulous. If Roy's case wins, then we've decided that scientific materialism is correct and consciousness is entirely the product of complex physical phenomena. No dualism.”

  “Which only leaves the soul.” Ajay put his cup down and leant back in his chair. Kali spread out on his lap and idly hooked a claw into the fabric of his jeans. The sun went behind a cloud and we sat in relative twilight. “Things do look rather bleak for the soul,” he said, addressing the cat, who looked back at him through half-lidded and unimpressed eyes. “Will 901 have one? Perhaps it will disengage from our mythology and be a free mind? Liberated to seek for truth in different ways we cannot imagine.”