city blues 01 - dome city blues (39 page)

“Maybe,” Jackal said.  “We won’t really know until we have a look-see.”

Iron Betty sat without speaking for nearly a minute.  I was beginning to wonder if she’d forgotten us, when she finally spoke again.  “Your Mr. Client... he is a catalyst.  He brings us closer to the
Convergence
.  Either Man or Machine will profit by his hand, but I cannot yet see which.  There are patterns—within patterns—within patterns.”  Her whispered voice reduced her words to something approaching a hiss.

“I don’t understand,” Jackal said.  “Are you saying that he can stay?  Or that he has to leave?”

“He is welcome,” the old woman said.  “Mr. Stalin... we can use his correct name here, can we not?  ...will hasten the Convergence.  Turning him from my door will not stop that from happening.”

“How do you know my name?” I asked.

“We listen to every whisper on the net,” Surf said.  “And your name is whispered in a lot of places.”

“What in the hell does that mean?  And what is this
Convergence
that I’m supposed to be affecting?”

“It’s like a race,” Jackal said, “to the next level of evolution.”

“A race?  Between whom?”

“Between Man and Machine,” Surf said.  His speech-synthesizer managed to capture the haughty quality in his voice: the tone that an adult uses to lecture a recalcitrant child.

“We’re competing with machines?” I asked.

Iron Betty sighed.  “Competing is perhaps not a strong enough word, Mr. Stalin. 
Vying for existence
might be more accurate.”

I snorted.  “So you’re telling me that there’s some kind of conspiracy of machines going on?  I’m supposed to believe that my household appliances are plotting behind my back?”

“Believe what you will,” Iron Betty whispered.  “But Homo Sapiens was not always the dominant species on this planet.  And there exists no law in nature that says that it must continue to be.”

“And this Convergence is supposed to be the next stage,” I said.  “Okay, I’ll go along.  What
is
the next stage.  What comes after Man?”

“Homo Trovectior,” Iron Betty said.

“Homo what?” I asked.

“Homo Trovectior,” Jackal said.  I couldn’t tell if she believed what they were saying, or if she had just heard the song so many times that she could sing along when they came to the verse.

“Homo, as in ‘Man’,” Surf added, still using his lecturing voice.  “And Trovectior, meaning ‘Advanced’.  Homo Trovectior: Advanced Man.  The next logical step in evolution: Man-plus-Machine.”

“And where is this Machine-Man supposed to come from?” I asked.

“Out of a bubble-gum machine,” Surf said.

Iron Betty snapped the fingers of her right hand; Surf shut up.

Jackal said, “Either we will create it ourselves, or machines will do it for us.”

I stared at her.

Iron Betty spoke again.  “It began toward the end of the last century, with the advent of so-called
fuzzy logic
.  Computers, which had previously been constrained to the concepts of
yes
and
no
, were introduced to the idea of
maybe
.”

I crossed my arms.  “What’s so great about
maybe
?  Yes and no are definite.  They’re decisive. 
Maybe
strikes me as wishy-washy.  Doesn’t that make it a weaker concept?”

“Maybe is not a weaker concept,” Iron Betty said.  “It is stronger.  Infinitely stronger. 
Maybe
allows us to conceive of a third alternative when only two choices are apparent.  That ability, that essential spark of creativity, was what separated the organic-mind from the machine-mind.  Fuzzy logic blurred that line; it gave machines the power to create.  It removed the single element that made man superior to machine.”

Everything that Iron Betty said had a flat quality to it, a listlessness that sounded more like litany than personal conviction.  Maybe she had been spouting her own platitudes for so long that she’d forgotten how to think.

“Give me a break,” I said.  “There are a hundred ways that man is superior to machine.  A thousand ways.  Ten thousand.”

Surf flexed his left hand, the mechanical one.  “Really?  Is this your
knowledge
speaking?  Or is it your
ego
?  Is your flesh-and-blood hand as powerful as a hydraulic press?  Can your legs run faster than a MagLev train?  Or a hovercar?”

He intentionally refocused his eyes, making certain that I could hear the whirring of the electroptic lenses.  “Can your organic eyeballs see in the infrared spectrum?  Or examine an object a thousand times smaller than the point of a needle?  How about your non-silicon brain?  Can it remember every telephone number in the Los Angeles directory?”

He smiled sardonically.  “Please, Mr. Stalin, tell me all the wonderful things that make you superior to a machine.”

Iron Betty snapped her fingers again.  “Enough.  Mr. Stalin gets the idea.”

She pointed an age-gnarled finger in my direction; her eyes never strayed from their unseen focal point.  “We approach the Convergence.  Whichever species reaches it first will become the first true organic-cybernetic hybrid.  And they will inherit the Earth.”

“What happens to the loser in this race?” I asked.

“Servitude,” said Jackal.  “Extinction.  We won’t really know until it happens.”

I said nothing; I was beginning to wonder if coming here had been a mistake.  These people were fruitcakes, and Jackal seemed to be just as nutty as the rest of them.

Iron Betty must have sensed my trepidation.  A sardonic smile flickered across her lips.  “We argue for nothing,” she said.  “It is not necessary that you understand the Convergence, Mr. Stalin, or even be aware of it.  You will be a part of it.  That is enough.”

Surf turned and walked away.  I was about to say something, when I realized that Jackal had fallen in behind Surf.  Not wanting to spend the rest of the night verbally fencing with a ninety-nine year old fruit bat who apparently lived in the net full-time, I hurried to catch up.  I was halfway across the room when it hit me: we had been dismissed, like servants.  Or children.

I caught up with Jackal and Surf just as they were turning into a hallway that led away from Iron Betty’s chamber.

Around the corner, we passed a young woman who was even farther gone than Surf.  Her shaved head was pocked by twenty or so gold alloy data jacks.  Rectangular patches of circuit board protruded from her scalp in several places, the skin around the circuits puckered in an uneasy mating between flesh and silicon.  Both of her eyes were cybernetic, as were her arms and legs.  She turned and watched me as we passed, her camera-eyes tracking me like a security system on alert.

I was glad when we turned another corner and I could no longer feel her electronic eyes on my back.

Surf led us to a small room.  He held open the door, but didn’t go inside.  “The rooms in this hall are for the acolytes.”

I stepped past him into the room, and looked around.  The furnishings were Spartan: one twin bed, one table, and one chair, all with the utilitarian solidity of prison furniture.  The entire wall facing the bed was photo-active.  An apparently continuous sequence of images and text appeared and vanished at speeds that were undoubtedly carefully timed, and subliminal.

The other walls were hung with holo-posters: a human skull superimposed over a snapshot of the net; the earth hanging in space, half its surface green-blue and organic, the other half rendered in chromed steel chased with circuit runs, and gears, and cables; a flat white background covered in crisp black ones and zeros, with a large numeral ‘two’ scrawled in red paintstick; a grainy black and white flat-photo of Alan Turing, the so-called father of Artificial Intelligence.

Opposite the entrance, there was a second door.  I walked across the room and opened it.  It led to a small bathroom, designed by the same no-frills architect who had planned the room itself.  It was clean, though.

I stepped back into the room and nodded toward the photo-active wall.  “What’s this?  A little subliminal programming for the new recruits?”

“Education,” Surf said.  “We don’t program our people; we educate them.”

“Turn it off,” I said.

Surf glanced at the flickering data on the wall.  “It won’t bother you.  After a little while, you’ll forget it’s even there.”

“Turn it off,” I said again.  “Or I’ll turn it off myself, with a chair.  I don’t want to be educated.”

Surf pulled a slender black remote out of his pocket and pointed it at the animated wall.  The images vanished, and the wall reappeared.

Jackal sat down on the bed and bounced to test the mattress.  “You’ll be all right here.”

I pulled off the windbreaker and tossed it on the foot of the bed.

Surf’s gravelly voice came from the still-open door, “If you
do
cross wires with an AI, are you going to slick it?”

Jackal laid back on the bed and looked at the ceiling.  “Probably not.  Why do you ask?”

Surf leaned against the door frame with an assumed air of indifference.  “I thought you might need some help.”

Jackal closed her eyes.  “What do you have in mind?”

“I’ve been cooking up a virus,” Surf said.  “All the simulations say that it’ll crack a hardened AI like a walnut.  I’m itching to try it.”

“What’s stopping you?” I asked.  “If you guys are trying to make sure that the balance tips in favor of Man instead of machines, destroying AI’s would seem to be built right into your job description.”

Surf’s voice took on the tone of a lecturer, and I knew that he was parroting learned doctrine.  “Destruction for destruction’s sake is not the mark of a species that is ready for ascension.”

“But you want to kill something anyway,” I said.

Surf’s cybernetic hand closed slowly.  “Every attack must be
on
purpose, and
with
purpose.”

Jackal rubbed her eyes and then opened them.  “In other words, you’re looking for an excuse.”

“Check it out,” I said.  “A cybernetic hit man.”

Jackal shot me a glance and then looked back at Surf.  “Thanks.  We’ll let you know.”

Surf nodded and left, pulling the door closed behind him.

I stood there, watching Jackal.

“Relax,” she said.  “I was just being polite back there.”

“You don’t really believe all that crap about the Convergence?”

“Of course not,” she said.  “But the silicon in my head makes me sort of an honorary member around here.  It pays off sometimes, so I’m very careful not to challenge the official party line.”

I picked up the jacket and pulled out the trid.  “Take a look at this.”  I handed it to Jackal.

She looked at the front then flipped it over.  “What does this shit on the back mean?”

“Payment instructions,” I said.  “Whoever kills me is supposed to call that number, read the poem, and leave the phone off the hook.  Supposedly, the Man will trace the call and get in touch.”

Jackal sat up.  “This number definitely doesn’t belong to the Man.  It’s a public service line, maybe a suicide prevention hot-line, or something like that.  It’s probably got a watch-dog routine coded into it.  You call the number and read the poem, the watch-dog sends out alarm signals in forty different directions.”

“So it can’t be traced?”

“Easy enough to find out who the phone line belongs to,” she said.  “But that won’t tell us anything.”

“Why not?”

“If you were broadcasting a contract hit, would you use your own phone?  This is a subroutine piggybacked to somebody else’s line.  Whoever owns this phone line has no idea; I guarantee it.”

“So there’s no way to trace this thing back to the source?”

“I didn’t say it couldn’t be done, but it’s dangerous as hell.”

“You can do it?”

“There probably aren’t more than four or five people in LA who can.  Me, Giri-Sama, Ice Rider, Captain Kangaroo.  Iron Betty could do it, if you asked her.”

“No thanks. 
You
do it.

Jackal stood up.  “I’ll need my deck.”  She yawned and stretched.  “And some sleep.  My edge is way off.”

Her yawn triggered one of my own.  “I know what you mean.”

She walked to the door.  “Get some rest, Stalin.  I’ll be back in a few hours.”

I locked the door behind her and kicked off my shoes.

How far could I trust Surf, or the rest of Jackal’s creepy little robot-wanna-be friends?  Was it safe to go to sleep?  Fifty thousand marks was a lot of money.

I slid the Blackhart under my pillow.  I hoped to catch a couple of hours of sleep without having to shoot anybody.  I turned the light off and climbed into bed.

CHAPTER 26

“It’s one of those egg muffin things.”  Jackal held out a white foil pouch printed with the logo of a fast food restaurant.  “It’s got cheese on it.  Do you like cheese?”

I opened the pouch.  “Yeah, I like cheese.  Thanks.”

She tossed a shoebox on the bed.  “Everybody likes cheese,” she said.  “Everybody but me.  There’s coffee in there too.”

The pouch contained an egg-and-bacon muffin wrapped in thermal plastic, a bulb of coffee, and a couple of paper napkins.  Breakfast for one.