Idolon

by Mark Budz

  "If Marta wants your help," Tossa said when he finished, "she'll ask for it. Until then, it's none of your business."

  Pelayo wasn't so sure. "I guess," he allowed.

  Tossa let out a breath, then took a step back and appraised the test philm with a practiced eye. "You look like you should be carrying a Bible in one hand and a Tommy gun in the other."

  "Yeah." He loosened his collar, then lifted his arms and turned in a little pirouette. "What do you think?"

  "Any idea who you're supposed to be?"

  "Uri didn't say. Asshole wouldn't give me shit. I was hoping maybe you could tell me."

  She moved closer to touch the sleeve of his jacket. "Did IBT provide the clothes, or did you pick them out yourself?"

  "They're part of the ware."

  "Serious?" She shifted her hand to explore the ridges of his knuckles and age line running through his palm.

  "The hair, too. "

  She frowned. "What's that on your face?"

  "What?"

  She reached up and turned his head under the ceiling-strung LEDs. "It looks like a blemish."

  He touched his right cheek. "Like a birthmark, you mean?"

  "Or a watermark." Tossa withdrew her hand. "What's the 'skin like without the philm?"

  Pelayo shrugged. "I haven't checked." Between Lagrante and Marta, there hadn't been time.

  "Let's take a look." She mirrored the screen on the Vurtronic.

  Pelayo studied his reflection. He initially mistook the necrotic gray patch for a shadow. But the size and shape didn't change as he turned his head under the ambient track lights.

  It could be a defect... or an indication something went wrong with the installation. Then again, maybe not.

  "Come on," Tossa teased. A smile sidled into one corner of her mouth. "Let's see what you got."

  _______

  Pelayo stripped out of his pants and shirt, down to gray boxer shorts and the watch philmed on his wrist. Held in place by a black leather strap, the elegantly crafted watch had a gold case and a black bezel with roman numerals. The name Hamilton was stenciled across the top half of the white- marbled face, while a small dial counted off seconds on the lower half of the face.

  He tapped the crystal with a fingernail. It felt hard and smooth as glass. "Any idea what kind of watch is this?"

  Tossa accessed a datician, scanned an image of the watch, uploaded it, then opened a d-splay inset on the mirror and conferenced him in on the ear- feed.

  According to the datician, the watch was a replica of a Hamilton Piping Rock with a 14K gold case. The watch was first introduced in the 1920s, and included a white gold version with a bronze-colored face.

  Pelayo pressed the crown, the winder knob on the side of the case, expecting the philm to toggle off manually. That's the way it worked with every other 'skin he'd tested. There was a basic on/off switch, normally in the form of a button, ring, or earring. Instead, a translucent d-splay appeared in the upper right of his field of view.

  "Well?" Tossa said.

  "Virtual menu," he said.

  Most of the menu options—tie color and width, suspenders, suit fabric (worsted, gabardine, Saxony) and pattern (pinstripe, herringbone, houndstooth check)—were grayed out, not available in the beta version. This included skin color. Caucasian was the only ethnic background supported. All other ethnicities—a comprehensive list that included Latasian and Vietino—were not yet offered.

  "Quit stalling," Tossa said.

  He thought-selected the option to display/hide the philm.

  The 'skin turned translucent as it deimaged. His pseudoidentity faded, giving way to nanosculpted features he barely recognized as himself. The hair on his body retreated, absorbed through the pores of his tissue into subcutaneous cavities, leaving him smooth-shaved. Naked, he couldn't feel the graphene exomer. With most 'skin, there was a dull, waxy patina that left his flesh feeling stiff and inelastic. This was different. All that remained was the retro Hamilton. He could even feel a dank, briny draft from the open transom on the other side of the room.

  Pelayo examined his flesh carefully in the mirror. There was no sign of the blotch, on his face or anywhere else.

  "It looks like it's part of the philm," he said.

  Tossa eyed him critically. "How do you feel?"

  "Fine." No ill effects, so far. It might be cosmetic, harmless, or normal even... part of the test plan.

  “Try rephilming," she suggested. "See what happens." She blinked, activating an eyefeed.

  When he rephilmed himself the blotch reappeared, in the same exact configuration and location. Definitely a hardware or software issue. Unless the betaware was reacting to something it encountered inside him... some physical or chemical trigger. "I wonder if maybe I should go in," he said. "Have Uri take a look at it?"

  Tossa coiled a strand of hair around one finger. "What if Lagrante's the cause of the glitch?"

  Assuming it was a glitch. Either way, there were risks. If the electronic skin was defective and it went undiagnosed, he could hull himself: permanent nerve and cell damage, according to the medical release he'd signed. If he went in, and the problem turned out to be serious, Uri would probably pull the plug on the clinical trial and scratch him as a test subject. If that happened, he would be left with nothing.

  Lagrante hadn't been able to crack the ware. It was possible he'd damaged the 'skin. If that was the case, and Pelayo brought it to the attention of IBT, things could get ugly. Uri would want to know where he'd been, who he'd been in contact with, what he'd been doing.

  "Let's wait," Pelayo decided. "See what it looks like in the morning." He could always claim that it had shown up while he was asleep... hadn't been discovered until he woke up.

  Tossa worried the strand of hair. "You sure?"

  "Yeah."

  He touched the blemish again. It didn't feel odd, abnormal.

  Neither did he.

  "I wish there was someone else you could go to to get checked out," she said.

  "It's probably nothing," he said.

  "I don't like it."

  "If we knew more about the background of the philm," he said, "that might tell us something."

  "You mean style, historical context, and cultural influences? Like that?"

  "Right." Pelayo led her back to the sofa and the boxes of cold Sri Lankan takeout. "What you've been doing in class," he said, pulling on pants and shirt.

  "It's not exactly the same. We don't get into fash-ioneering. But I might be able to run some crossreferences, see what turns up."

  While he heated the takeout, Tossa uploaded the images she'd grabbed with her eyefeed cams.

  Overhead, moonlight etched hieroglyphs into the skylight perched on the roof of the converted warehouse. Hairline cracks in the glassine, sutured together with cartilage-thick welts of epoxy, cast a shadowy web of veins on the concrete floor slab.

  He brought the plates back to the coffee table. A moment later, a black-and-white still appeared on the d-splay. The photograph showed a man lounging next to an old gasoline-engine sedan, parked in front of a dry sand beach. The man sported a suit similar to the one Pelayo was waring.

  "The suit's called a Windsor," Tossa said. "It's a modified version of a 'drape cut' suit originally created by this London tailor, Frederick Scholte. Its trademark features are slightly tapered sleeves, wide, pointed lapels, and shoulder pads."

  "What time period are we talking?"

  "Around 1935 to 1940."

  Pelayo brushed at a short length of noodle clinging to his shirtsleeve. "What's the suit made out of?"

  "Worsted yarn."

  Pelayo shook his head.

  "Cloth made out of thread spun from combed, stapled wool. It has a hard sheen to it. A super glossy, smooth finish."

  "How about the shirt and tie?"

  "Cotton and silk. The shoes are patent leather."

  "Who wore Windsors?"

  "White-collar professionals, mostly. Businessmen, politicians, entert
ainers. Like that. It was seen as a sign of success."

  "What about religious leaders?"

  "Sure. As soon as religion got to be big business, religious leaders became these big-time media personalities. Especially televangelists. They packaged and sold faith as entertainment."

  "So they dressed the part."

  "Exactly."

  "That fits in with the corporate angle Lagrante was telling me about. The tough-ass business 'tude tempered by strict moral values."

  Tossa frowned at something on her eyefeed. "This is interesting."

  A new d-splay opened on the Vurtronic screen. It showed a large sphere next to a tall, triangular needle or spike. The design incorporated both geometric elements as part of a larger Christian-style cross.

  "What is it?" he said.

  "The Perisphere and Trylon," Tossa said, "from the 1939 New York World's Fair. They were part of something called The World of Tomorrow exhibition." She opened another d-splay, clicked through various images of the fair, then paused to chew on a sporkful of eggplant.

  "We're talking Art Deco," he said.

  "Futurism, too. It was all about science and technology. According to the datalib, 'this perfect machine-based world is one of the primary metanarratives of the twentieth century.'"

  The d-splay expanded to accommodate a monolithic cityscape. The mountainous buildings were all composed of flat, sharp-edged planes with a grid of windows. There was no color, only charcoal shades of gray.

  "The style pretty much eliminated all decorative ornamentation," Atossa said. "It was big on simple geometric shapes, like cubes and triangles."

  A tall zigzag building, albumen silver and perforated with windows, replaced the cityscape.

  "Function over form," Pelayo said.

  Tossa nodded and swallowed.

  Pelayo scraped more chunks of diced pineapple onto his plate. "So what does that have to do with the philm?"

  "I guess it's trying to tap into that particular narrative. Simple, plain, fundamentalist. Whatever."

  "But why R&D a whole new 'skin just to develop a new cast?" Pelayo shook his head, got up, and began to pace. It didn't make sense.

  Tossa got up from the sofa and joined him next to the wall d-splay. She slid a hand into his left front pant's pocket. Gentle fingers curled around him and he felt himself grow stiff.

  "No," he said.

  "Why not?"

  Uri had warned him about dirty-dicking himself. But Pelayo wondered if Uri was more worried about him passing something on to someone else. "IBT said not to. Plus…

  Tossa stopped stroking, but kept her fingers in place. Holding him that way. "The blemish?" she said.

  He nodded. "Do you know if any other images like these have shown up anyplace else?"

  "Together, you mean? In the same context?"

  "Yeah. Maybe there's a connection to some larger audience, a new political smob or philm cast."

  Slowly, reluctantly, she withdrew her hand. "I'll ask around. See what I can find out."

  Figure that out and he might have a better idea of where he stood, what plans IBT had for the 'skin, and what role he would be expected to play.

  17

  One of the flies in Zhenyu al-Fayoumi's latest experimental test group had acquired a new face.

  Al-Fayoumi stared at the magnified image on a virtual d-splay. The face was female, with kohl-etched almond-shaped eyes, a long, narrow nose, full lips, and a graceful neck. According to the datician he queried for enhancement and face-print comparison, the features matched a stone statue of Queen Nefertiti.

  How had the latest image, the idolon, been transmitted? Where had it come from? Had it been inherited from a parent, another unrelated fly, or the environment? Was it an entirely new image, or a permutation of an existing one?

  The fly had emerged from its pupa late last night. Early that morning, al-Fayoumi had separated the offspring flies from the parent population and applied a layer of electronic skin to the head and wings of each. Several hours later, the mutant image had appeared.

  None of the fly's siblings had acquired this particular idolon. They had expressed the parent image: David Hedison from the original 1958 version of The Fly. That was typical of the epigenetic mode of inheritance he was hypothesizing: images were being transmitted from flies to their descendents without the information being encoded in either the soft or digital DNA of the parents. To complicate matters, every so often a spontaneous and apparently random mutation occurred. Inexplicably, an offspring fly inherited a new face.

  The faces had started out as a gimmick. As part of a grant proposal to study image expression in digital allotropes, he had philmed a batch of flies, adding the gray and yellow feathers of a goldfinch to their wings.

  Ha-hah. Everyone in the Developmental Nanobiology Department got a kick out of it, undergrads, grad students, staff, even faculty.

  Could he do faces? they wanted to know. Sure. Airplane wings? Why not? After all, anything was possible.

  The requests poured in. So he became a fly guy. A strict vegetarian for most of his life, he had purchased meat, bred maggots, and philmed his flies with the faces of old comedians, politicians, and big-screen movie stars. He gave the flies the Rising Sun wings of kamikaze Zeros, Iron Cross biplanes, and Hammer and Sickle MIGs.

  It became a game. The game ended after he 'skinned a new batch of flies but had to leave before he could philm them. When he returned a few hours later, he found that all of the new flies had inherited the philm image of the parent fly, the gold- and-blue mask of King Tutankhamen.

  A practical joke, his detractors claimed. That's all he was seeing. Not a new form of phenotype transmission or epigenetic inheritance. Certainly not Lamarckian inheritance.

  At first he agreed. What else could it be? Someone, a colleague, was having a bit of fun with him.

  Without telling anyone, he repeated the process. The result was the same. The offspring flies inherited the primary image after only a few hours. Somehow it was being copied, transmitted from one generation of electronic 'skin to the next.

  How? For weeks, the question haunted him. The inheritance appeared to be Lamarckian, as absurd as a kid being born with a tattoo identical to one inked on one of his or her parents. Clearly, there must be some other mechanism. But, fearful of damaging his credibility, he was afraid to investigate openly. Safer, at first, to pursue the matter in secret, on his own time. That way, he wouldn't be risking his reputation. He could always go public later, after he had a better idea of what was going on and whether it was a valid line of inquiry or not. For the time being the less anyone knew about what he was doing the better. Except for a couple of bootleggers and rip artists he occasionally contacted for information about black-market ware, he had managed to maintain a low profile.

  Until now.

  Al-Fayoumi checked the time. Not quite eleven. The man hadn't shown. Possibly he wouldn't. Possibly he was having second thoughts. Fine. Al-Fayoumi should never have agreed to meet with him in person, and especially not in his lab. A mistake. Neutral ground would have been better, a restaurant or a hotel lobby.

  Or not at all.

  Al-Fayoumi stared into the gloom of his basement. The makeshift lab was jammed with flimsy steel shelves, storage cabinets, and recycled lab equipment, most of it purchased at flea markets and scavenger shops in the Trenches. The only light came from the red heat lamps over the terrariums, and the phosphor-bright traces of the flies buzzing about.

  How had the man, who called himself Yukawa, heard about what he was working on? Who had told him? One of his black-market contacts? Or was there another source he didn't know about?

  Troubled, al-Fayoumi wrung his hands. He needed to know. That was the main reason he had agreed to meet. There had also been a hint of private funding, dangled in front of him like a bright lure.

  After a year he still didn't know how the images were transmitted or inherited. He was at a dead end. All he had were a couple of working principles he had
been unable to prove: one, all philm-based images were the same image, and two, all programmable matter was the same matter.

  A message d-splay opened and a DiNA signature code blinked in his field of view. Al-Fayoumi's hands grew chill, his underarms damp.

  Yukawa had arrived.

  _______

  The man wore silk shirt and slacks, both an unostentatious silver-gray. His jacket was a tasteful Art Brico collage of fabrics that successfully integrated African tribal weavings and Indian reshamwork. Despite its slapdash appearance, the design was very calculated. There was nothing arbitrary about it.

  He had philmed himself as a Japanese zaibatsu samurai: high cheekbones, straight nose, coarse black hair parted in the middle and smoothed back. The smooth patina of the philm and the waxy stiffness of the 'skin combined to create a portrait of quiet reserve and firm candor. It wasn't a face al-Fayoumi immediately recognized. It was probably a composite image, fashioned from obscure cinematic references he was unfamiliar with.

  Clothing had always been an indicator of attitude, values, or status. Philm was no different. Except that it also exhibited certain traits of epigenetic inheritance, mainly the transmission of phenotype through virtual updates and downloads.

  "Mr. al-Fayoumi." The man bowed. At the same time he held out his hand. "A pleasure to meet you. Thank you for agreeing to see me." He peered at al-Fayoumi from over the tops of vintage WWII-era eyeglasses.

  "Mr. Yukawa." They shook. Then al-Fayoumi led him down a narrow hallway to the main lab.

  The man claimed to be with Sigilint, a philmware development firm that specialized in dynamic imaging systems and remote, downloadable plug-ins for electronic skin.

  "Can I get you something?" al-Fayoumi asked. The words felt awkward, atrophied. It had been months since he'd had a visitor.

  "I'm fine. Thank you."

  Al-Fayoumi nodded. So much for formal niceties.

  Yukawa solved the problem by taking an interest in the terrariums, with their dizzy electron clouds of flies. "Is this what you are working on now?"

  "Idolons," al-Fayoumi said.