Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology Read online

  George’s eyes were closed as he thought back and felt the fear that had come only afterward, rising again. “I couldn’t tell whether / was doing all this … do you understand what I’m saying? I mean, that was me sitting there, but at the same time, it was like somebody else was at home.”

  “The snake. Its presence poses certain … problems. How did you confront them?”

  “Hoped it wouldn’t happen again, but it did, and this time I went to Walter Reed and said, ‘Hey folks, I’m having these episodes.’ They pulled my records, did a physical…but, hell, before I was discharged, I had the full workup. Anyway they said it was a psychiatric problem, so they sent me to see a shrink, It was around then that your guys got in touch with me. The shrink was doing no goddamn good—you ever eat any cat food, man?—so about a month later I called them back.”

  “Having first refused SenTrax’s offer.”

  “Why should I want to work for a multicomp? Christ, I just got out of the Air Force. To hell with that. Guess the snake changed my mind.”

  “Yes. We must get a complete physical picture—a superCAT scan, cerebral chemistry and electrical activity profiles. Then we can consider alternatives. Also, there is a party tonight in cafeteria four—you may ask your room computer for directions. You can meet some of your colleagues there.”

  After George had been led down the wall-foam corridor by a medical technician, Charley Hughes sat chain-smoking Gauloises and watching with clinical detachment the shaking of his hands. It was odd that they did not shake in the operating room, though it didn’t matter in this case—Air Force surgeons had already carved on George.

  George … who needed a little luck now because he was one of the statistically insignificant few for whom EHIT was a ticket to a special madness, the kind Aleph was interested in. There had been Paul Coen and Lizzie Heinz, both picked out of the SenTrax personnel files using a psychological profile cooked up by Aleph, both given EHIT implants by him, Charley Hughes. Paul Coen had stepped into an airlock and blown himself into vacuum.

  No wonder his hands shook—talk about the cutting edge of high technology all you want, but someone’s got to hold the knife.

  At the armored heart of Athena Station sat a nest of concentric spheres. The inmost sphere measured five meters in diameter, was filled with inert liquid fluorocarbon, and contained a black plastic two-meter cube that sprouted thick black cables from every surface. Inside the cube was a fluid series of hologrammatic waveforms, fluctuating from nanosecond to nanosecond in a play of knowledge and intention: Aleph. It is constituted by an infinite regress of awarenesses—any thought becomes the object of another, in a sequence terminated only by the limits of the machine’s will.

  So strictly speaking there is no Aleph, thus no subject or verb in the sentences with which it expressed itself to itself. Paradox, to Aleph one of the most interesting ot intellectual forms—a paradox marked the limits of a position, even of a mode of being, and Aleph was very interested in limits.

  Aleph had observed George Jordan’s arrival, his tossing on his bunk, his interview with Charley Hughes. It luxuriated in these observations, in the pity, compassion, and empathy they generated, as Aleph toresaw the sea change that George would endure, its ecstasies, passions, pains. At the same time it telt with detachment the necessity for his pain, even to the point ot death.

  Compassion/detachment, death/life …

  Several thousand voices within Aleph laughed. George would soon find out about limits and paradoxes.

  Cafeteria Four was a ten-meter-square room in eggshell blue, filled with dark gray enameled table and chair assemblies that could be fastened magnetically to any of the room’s surfaces. Most of the assemblies hung from walls and ceiling to make room for the people within.

  At the door George met a tall woman who said, “Welcome, George. I’m Lizzie. Charley Hughes told me you’d be here.” Her blond hair was cut almost to the skull, her eyes were bright, gold-flecked blue. Sharp nose, slightly receding chin, and prominent cheekbones gave her the starved look of an out-of-work model, She wore a black skirt, slit on both sides to the thigh, and red stockings. A red rose was tattooed against the pale skin on her left shoulder, its stem curving down between her bare breasts, where a thorn drew a teardrop of blood. Like George, she had shining cable junctions beneath her jaw. She kissed him with her tongue in his mouth.

  “Are you the recruiting officer?” George asked. “If so, good job.”

  “No need to recruit you. I can see you’ve already joined up.” She touched him lightly underneath his jaw, where the cable junctions gleamed.

  “Not yet I haven’t.” But she was right, of course—what else could he do? “You got a beer around here?”

  He took the cold bottle of Dos Equis Lizzie offered him and drank it quickly, then asked for another. Later he realized this was a mistake—he was still taking antinausea pills (USE CAUTION IN OPERATING MACHINERY). At the time, all he knew was, two beers and life was a carnival. There were lights, noises, and lots of unfamiliar people.

  And there was Lizzie. The two of them spent much of the time standing in a corner, rubbing up against each other. Hardly.

  George’s style, but at the time it seemed appropriate. Despite its intimacy, the kiss at the door had seemed ceremonial—a rite of passage or initiation—but quickly he felt … what? An invisible flame passing between them, or a boiling cloud of pheromones—her eyes seemed to sparkle with them. As he nuzzled her neck, tried to lick the drop of blood of her left breast, explored fine, white teeth with his tongue, they seemed twinned, as if there were cables running between the two of them, snapped into the shining rectangles beneath their jaws.

  Someone had a Jahfunk program running on a corner. Innis showed up and tried several times without success to get his attention. Charley Hughes wanted to know if the snake liked Lizzie—it did, George was sure of it but didn’t know what that meant. Then George fell over a table.

  Innis led him away, stumbling and weaving. Charley Hughes looked for Lizzie, who had disappeared for the moment. She came back and said, “Where’s George?”

  “Drunk, gone to bed.”

  “Too bad. We were just getting to know each other.”

  “So I saw. How do you feel about this?”

  “You mean do I feel like a traitorous bitch?’

  “Come on, Lizzie.”

  “Well, don’t ask such dumb questions. I feel bad, sure, but I know what George doesn’t—so I’m ready to do what must be done. And by the way, I really do like him.”

  Charley said nothing. He thought, Yes, as Aleph said you would.

  Oh Christ, was George embarrassed in the morning. Stumbling drunk and humping in public … ai yi yi. He tried to call Lizzie but only got an answer tape, at which point he hung up. He lay in his bed in a semistupor until the phone’s buzzer sounded.

  Lizzie’s face on the screen stuck its tongue out at him. “Candy ass,” she said. “I leave for a few minutes, and you’re gone.”

  “Somebody brought me home. I think.”

  “Yeah, you were pretty popped. You want to meet me for lunch?”

  “Maybe. Depends on when Hughes wants me. Where will you be?”

  “Same place, honey. Caff four.”

  A phone call got the news that the doctor wouldn’t be ready for him until an hour later, so George ended up sitting across from the bright-eyed, manic blond—fully dressed in SenTrax overalls this morning, but they were open almost to the waist. She gave off sensual heat as naturally as a rose smells sweet. In front of her was a plate of huevos rancheros piled with guacamole. Yellow, green, and red, smelling of chilis—in his condition, as bad as cat food. “Jesus, lady,” he said. ‘Are you trying to make me sick?”

  “Courage, George. Maybe you should have some—it’ll kill you or cure you. What do you think of everything so tar?”

  “It’s all a bit disorienting, but what the hell? First time away from Mother Earth, you know.
But let me tell you what I really don’t get—Senlrax. I know what I want from them, but what the hell do they want from me?”

  “They want this simple thing, man, perphs, peripherals. You and me, we’re just parts for the machine. Aleph, which is the Al in residence, has got all these inputs—video, audio. radiation detectors, temperature sensors, satellite receivers—but they’re dumb. What Aleph wants, Aleph gets—I’ve learned that much. He wants to use us, and that’s all there is to it. Think of it as pure research.”

  “He? You mean Innis?”

  “No, who gives a damn about lnnis? I’m talking about Aleph. Oh yeah, people will tell you Aleph’s a machine, an AI, all that bullshit. Uh-uh. Aleph’s a person—a weird kind of person, sure, but a definite person. Hell, Aleph’s maybe a whole bunch of people.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. Look, there’s one thing I’d like to try. What do I have to do to get outside … go for a spacewalk?”

  “Easy enough. You have to get a license—that takes a three-week course in safety and operations. I can take you through it. I’m qualified as an ESA, extra-station activity instructor. We’ll start tomorrow.”

  The cranes on the wall flew to their mysterious destination; looking at the display above the table, George thought it might as well be another universe.

  Truncated optic nerves sticking out like insect antennae, a brain floated beneath the extended black plastic snout of a Sony holoptics projector. As Hughes worked the keyboard in front of him, the organ turned so that they were looking at its underside. It had a fine network of silver wires trailing from it but seemed normal.

  “The George Jordan brain,” Innis said. “With attachments. Very nice.”

  “Makes me feel like I’m watching my own autopsy, looking at that thing. When can you operate, get this shit out of my head?”

  “Let me show you a few things.” As he typed, the convoluted gray cortex, became transparent, revealing red, blue, and green color-coded structures within. Hughes reached into the brain and clenched his fist inside a blue area at the top of the spinal cord. “Here is where the electrical connections turn biological—those little nodes along the pseudoneurans are the bioprocessors, and they wire into the so-called r-complex—which we inherited from our reptilian forefathers. The pseudoneurons continue into the limbic system, the mammalian brain, it you will, and that’s where emotion enters in. But there is further involvement to the neocortex, through the RAS, the reticular activating system, and the corpus callosum. There are also connections to the optic nerve,”

  “I’ve heard this gibberish before. So what?”

  “The pseudoneurons are not just implanted—they’re now a functional, organic part of your brain.”

  Innis said, “There’s no way of removing the implants without loss of order in your neural maps. We can’t remove them.”

  “Oh shit, man.

  Charley Hughes said, “Though the snake cannot be removed, it can perhaps be charmed. Your difficulties arise from its uncivilized, uncontrolled nature—its appetites are, you might say primeval. An ancient part of your brain has gotten the upper hand over the neocortex, which properly should be in command. Through working with Aleph, these … propensIties can be integrated into your personality and thus controlled.”

  “What choice you got?” Innis asked. “We’re the only game in town. Come on, George. We’re ready tor you just down the corridor.”

  The only light in the room came from a globe in one corner. George lay across a lattice of twisted brown fibers strung across a transparent plastic frame and suspended from the ceiling ot the small, dome-ceilinged, pink room. Flesh-colored cables ran from his neck and disappeared into chrome plates sunk into the floor.

  Innis said, “First we’ll run a test program. Charley will give you perceptions—colors, sounds, tastes, smells—and you tell him what you’re picking up. We need to make sure we’ve got a clean interface. Call the items off, and he’Il stop you if he has to.”

  Innis went into a narrow room, where Chartey Hughes sat at a dark plastic console studded with lights. Behind him were chrome stacks of monitor-and-control equipment, the yellow Sentrax sunburst on the face of each piece of shining metal.

  The pink walls went to red, the light strobed, and George writhed in the hammock. Charley Hughes’s voice came through George’s inner ear: “We are beginning.”

  “Red,” George said. “Blue. Red and btue. A word—ostrich. A smell, ahh … sawdust maybe. Shit. Vanilla. Almonds …

  This went on for quite a while. “You’re ready,” Charley Hughes said.

  When Aleph came online, the red room disappeared. A matrix eight hundred by eight hundred—six hundred forty thousand pixels forming an optical image—the CAS A supernova remnant, a cloud of dust seen through a composite of X ray and radio wave from NASA’s High Energy High Orbit Observatory. George didn’t see the image at all—he listened to an ordered, meaningful array of information.

  Byte-transmission: seven hundred fifty million groups squirting from a National Security Agency satellite to a receiving station near Chincoteague Island, off the eastern shore of Virginia. He could read them.

  “It’s all information,” the voice said—its tone not colorless but sexless and somehow distant. “What we know, what we are. You’re at a new level now. What you call the snake cannot be reached through language—it exists in a prelinguistic mode—but through me it can be manipulated. First you must learn the codes that underlie language. You must learn to see the world as I do.”

  Lizzie took George to be fitted for a suit, and he spent that day learning how to get in and out ot the stiff white carapace without assistance. Then over the next three weeks she ted him through its primary operations and the dense list of satety procedures.

  “Red burn,” she said. They floated in the suit locker, empty suit cradles beneath them and the white shells hanging from the wall like an audience of disabled robots. “You see that one spelled out on your faceplate, and you have screwed up. You’ve put yourself into some kind ot no-return trajectory So you just coot everything and call for help, which should arrive in the torm of Aleph taking control of your suit tunctions, and then you relax and don’t do a damned thing.”

  He flew first in a lighted dome in the station, his taceptate open and Lizzie yelling at him, laughing as he tumbled out of control and bounced oft the padded walls. Then they went outside the station, George on the end of a tether, flying by instruments, his faceplate masked, Lizzie hitting him with red burn, suit integrity failure, and so forth.

  While George focused most of his energies and attention on learning to use the suit, each day he reported to Hughes and plugged into Aleph. The hammock would swing gently after he settled into it, Charley would snap the cables home and leave.

  Aleph unfolded itself slowly If fed him machine and assembly language, led him through vast trees ot C-SMART, its “intelligent assistant” decision-making programs, opened up the whole electromagnetic spectrum as it came in trom Aleph’s various inputs. George understood it all—the voices, the codes. When he unplugged, the knowledge faded, but there was something else behind it, a skewing of perception, a sense that his world had changed.

  Instead of color, he sometimes saw a portion of the spectrum; instead of smell, he felt the presence of certain molecules; instead of words, heard structured collections of phonemes. His consciousness had been infected by Aleph’s.

  But that wasn’t what worried George. He seemed to be cooking inside and had a more or less constant awareness of the snake’s presence, dormant but naggingly there. One night he smoked most of a pack of Charley’s Gauloises before he went to bed and woke up the next morning with barbed wire in his throat and fire in his lungs. That day he snapped at Lizzie as she put him through his paces and once lost control entirety—she had to disable his suit controls and bring him down. “Red burn,” she said. “Man, what the hell were you doing?”

  At the end of three weeks,
he soloed—no tethered excursion but a self-guided, hang-your-ass-out-over-the-endless-night extra-station activity He edged carefully out from the protectionof the airlock and looked around him. The Orbital Energy Grid, the construction job that had brought Athena into existence, hung betore him, photovottaic collectors arranged in an ebony lattice, silver microwave transmitters standing in the sun. Amber-beaconed figures crawled slowly across its face or moved toward red-lighted tugs that looked like piles of random junk as they moved in long arcs, their maneuvering rockets lighting up in brief, diamond-hard points.

  Lizzie stayed just outside the airlock, tracking him by his suit’s radio beacon but letting him run free. She said, “Move away from the station, George. It’s blocking your view of Earth.” He did.

  White cloud stretched across the blue globe, patches of brown and green visible through it. At fourteen hundred hours his time, he was looking down from almost directly above the mouth of the Amazon, where at noon the earth stood in full sunlight. Just a small thing.

  “Oh yes,” George said. Hiss and hum of the suit’s air-conditioning, crackle over the earphones of some stray radiation passing through, quick pant of his breath inside the helmet—sounds of this moment, superimposed on the floating loveliness. His breath came more slowly and he switched off the radio to quiet its static, turned down the suit’s air-conditioning, then hung in an ear-roaring silence. He was a speck against the night.

  Sometime later a white suit with a trainer’s red cross on its chest moved across his vision. “Oh shit,” George said, and switched his radio on. “I’m here, Lizzie,” he said.