Mimsy were the borogoves, p.1
Alison Sinclair, page 1
Assassin
a short storyby Alison Sinclair
“I think I’ve got an assassin,” Glad greeted me when I arrived at the precinct that Wednesday morning. I was tempted to say not before it got me, but I didn’t.
Glad was pleased with herself: The mood beads in her crinkled black hair pulsed yellow and green. I leaned over her shoulder and murmured, “Is that avaricious yellow, I see.” She gave me her wide-mouthed grin. The beads sparkled with the swirling blue and white of amusement overlaid with friendship, overlaid with a shimmer of lust.
“Keep your mind on your work, and off your layover,” I advised.
“Shit,” said Glad, and reached up beneath her hair and popped the connection between sensors and microprocessor. The beads faded to dull lilac but her blush glowed. I pretended not to notice. “What have you got?”
What she had was a stub of code with enough path info to tell her which neuronode was being addressed. “Moodnode,” she said.
“Source?”
“A PC.”
“Bootleg,” I said. “Downloaded from one of the Joynets. Let their security handle it.”
“Coroner’s office sent it over,” Glad said quietly. “Woman took a header off a balcony. Not much left of her headware, so they checked out her PC. Last week it’d have been suicide; this week they’ve got cadets—”
“Don’t remind me.” One of ours had locked up our system twice already.
“And some bright pixel thought this was suspicious. Strangely enough he’s right. This wasn’t chewed up by the user’s endonucleases; ends aren’t right.”
“I take your word for it.”
She sighed profoundly. One of the things I like about Glad is she doesn’t rely on beads to communicate for her.
“This isn’t any one of the user’s—she had nine.”
“Nine … paranoia rules.”
“Even paranoids have enemies … And it isn’t a Thrillnet one; I’ve got the system checking the other nets she accessed—she was heavily into it, FantasyNets, ThrillNets, JoyNets, LoveNets—those I can get any info on. We’ve got to do something about those bastards.”
“They won’t admit their security isn’t perfect. Lose customer confidence.”
“On the ThrillNets? They’re not into safety; I’d be hard put to tell the difference between a virus and some legit ThrillWare.”
Ouch, I thought. “I still don’t see why you think it’s an assassin and not just an odd bit of bootleg code.”
“Because—” then she sighed. “Just a gut feeling. One, it’s addressed to the mood circuits. Two, it isn’t the fragment you’d expect for a legit program chewed up by the perscom programs or the nets. Three, it’s off a suicide. I’ve sent out for records from other suicides—”
“Kiss off your social life for the next century.”
“Give me some credit, Mouse. I’m looking for unexplained suicides of people with active mood inplants.”
“You think such a creature exists. People don’t go for mood mod and synthesis because they’re happy with their lives and want to get happier—” No, I thought, let’s leave that. “So what you think is that the assassin fed our lady a downer, and she jumped.”
“Or upper. Send the correct set of overrides to a mood implant, and bang, instant florid schizophrenia. She may have thought she was a bird. Or the room was on fire. Or God was telling her she was an angel…. Whatever.”
“I’m surprised,” I said, after a moment, “you found it.”
“So am I. Somebody’s been careless, or there was some inhibitor in this PC’s system.”
“Well, live right and maybe the dAIty’ll smile on you.”
Glad and I lunched in The Caverns, the developer’s answer to city-center space limitation, five levels, going down. We patronize a salad joint called Charon’s on the Styx—wonderful soup, don’t ask where they grow the greens. Over salad and soup we talked about life, the universe, men and everything. Glad had met someone new; or someone else, anyway. Everything she said fitted a pattern; it wasn’t going to last. Glad knew how to pick them for a short good time and no lasting regrets. I envied her. My layover, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, had been one long argument, latest installment of an even longer argument. Errel had become convinced he was missing out, careerwise, relationshipwise—he wanted to have input nodes implanted, mood and memory nodes. Fine; it was his brain and his bank account. But he wanted me along. He talked about our relationship; I talked about my work. I knew I wasn’t telling him the truth and I had the feeling he wasn’t telling me everything, so it went round and round.
“The latest,” I told Glad, “is that now he’s started talking about changing his name back to Joshua, and going home for a visit.” I pushed a slice of tomato to the side of the plate: the blacklighting in Charon’s on the Styx picked up a faintly iridescent, unhealthy sheen on its skin. Probably badly washed. Glad’s eyes and teeth flashed purple-white.
“Home as in West.”
“That’s right. Talks about his parents getting older. Mellowing. I bit my tongue. Nothing he’s ever said to me suggested they’d be the type to mellow. The only way he’d get back—or half way back—would be by casting himself as cautionary parable for the rest of his life.”
“What about the girl he was supposed to have married?”
“Happily married, he understands. The innocent wonders how she can have any grudge.”
Glad nodded understanding. Sarah was the girl Errel who was Joshua was to have married, at the age of seventeen, until he glimpsed before him a life like his father’s and grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s … fifty, sixty, seventy years in a time-slipped enclave, punishing, denying, mortifying his curiosity. But even that he could have endured, he said, if he had not also seen himself in twelve years time laying righteous punishment on the back of a daughter or son into whom he had bred that curiosity. And so he had left a letter to his intended bride in the roadside postbox, amongst the letters of congratulation and best wishes, walked sixteen miles to the nearest monorail station, and with some of the money that should have started their married life, bought a one way rail ticket to the nearest city large enough to lose himself in.
If she were happy now, I thought, she might forgive the marriage that had not happened, but what she would not forgive, I was sure, was what had happened, the humiliation, the weeks of hearing the story being told in whispers just out of her hearing.
“Hell hath no fury,” Glad commented, sharing my thought. “That doesn’t go with his itch to be wired. What’s brought this on?”
“I wish I knew. He says it’s got to do with work, but farmer’s advocacy he can do as well unwired as wired, and the people he’s doing it for trust him more for it. He’s said it himself.”
“Got his eye on another job?”
“Not that I know.”
“Do you think he’d stay out West?”
“Not under their conditions.”
“Yeah, I know how he feels,” Glad said. “I mean, Naturalists aren’t as fanatical as some of the religious sects, but I’m always aware of having to screen everything just before I say it. And still I resent them a little for the fantasy world they live in, their choice, and giving me none—I mean, even my name, for Christ’s sake. Galadriel.” She sighs. “All the accommodation seems to have to be on my side. But I wouldn’t be without them. I know how he feels.”
I, I thought, do not. But perhaps that is because all the emotion in me designated for parents is directed towards, concentrated on, the suddenly frail, suddenly old man in a ward at Beth Israel. “Are we going to see D’Inde tonight?”
“Of course. It’s Wednesday.”
I arrived home later than usual, and found Errel lighting up the inside of the hall with anger and impatience. I hadn’t seen this particular headdress before; it looked spiky and mildly barbaric.
I said, “Before you start, this is Wednesday, and on Wednesdays I go and visit the Old Man when I get done.”
“You couldn’t bring yourself to make an exception just this once. I did ask.”
“And I said no,” I said, and pushed past him, into our bedroom.
“Particularly not for my friends,” he said, following. “You’ve made it abundantly clear you weren’t interested in going.”
With me and you and a bed for two, the air was getting squashed. “Errel, just let me get dressed.”
“You call that dressed,” as I lifted down my thermocolour pantsuit from its bin.
“Yes, I call it dressed.” I laid it down, and sat beside it on the bed. I was not going to strip with him in the room in this mood; it felt too much like nakedness. “Maybe it’s not chic amongst the banking set, but I’m not amongst the banking set; I’m just your arm accessory for the evening.”
“Les,” he changed tack, “Lester, just do it for me. Wear your lights.”
“I do not feel like wearing my lights in a roomful of strangers. Particularly after this afternoon.”
“The Old Man?”
That ‘Old Man’ made me set my teeth. One of the reasons we had come to be in this room together was Errel had always had exquisite judgment in the taking of liberties. Lately, though, his judgment seemed to have coarsened. Or maybe I was just oversensitive; even his squad used to call D’Inde The Old Man.
The problem was, then it hadn’t been a joke, and now it wasn’t.
I put a hand down on my pantsuit leg, and watched an aura of blue grow around it, as my body heat reached it.
“Every time I go there I have t
The blue developed a slight tinge of green around my fingers and palm.
“He’d have preferred to have been a vegetable? Or dead?”
“How should I know?” People who picked up that I wasn’t thrilled at the miracles of modern medical technology kept asking me that. I didn’t have an answer. The only person who could answer that was a man who no longer was. The green became a distinct band, within the blue.
“One of the worst things about it all,” I heard myself say, “is purely selfish. That man knew things about me that aren’t even on record, that don’t even exist in any form other than in my memory and in his. Now that’s gone, because they can only give him back what’s on record. I feel as though part of me has vanished along with part of him.”
Like the person I used to be, before I became Lester.
“Well,” Errel said, sliding his hand down my shoulder, “maybe some day you’ll want to tell someone else these things.”
I did not know whether to let myself melt or be furious; to avoid the decision, I stood up and returned the thermosuit to its bin and pulled down a plain black catsuit and mood-bead veil, small but pricy, because of the EEG circuitry. I saw Errel’s smile framed by indigo. “You are down,” he said, softly.
“I told you I was,” I said, unable to prevent myself from stressing told.
“No, don’t take them off,” he said. “I want to apologise, and I’d like to see—if it takes.”
“We used to be able to do that without light-effects.”
“We thought we did,” he said. “I’ve had the feeling that maybe we were—maybe we didn’t understand each other as well as we thought.”
I kept my eyes on his face, not on the slivers of yellow crowning his head.
“What do you mean?”
“Les, I’ve always wanted to know what I missed; I thought you understood that.”
“I get ‘planted, I go on the Nets, I can’t work Virus-squad any more.”
“We don’t have to go on the Nets.”
“You’ll want to know what comes next, won’t you?” I was distracted by a colour change at my peripheral vision, green changing to yellow, on its way to red, if I were not so—so what? The beads could only indicate simple emotion, and mine were anything but. The yellow fixed, and I watched his eyes shift from one side to the other, waiting for them to change, and then reached up and janked the whole apparatus off. “Now watch my face,” I told him. “And listen: I’ll tell you what I feel. I’m wondering what happened to the man who moved in with me, because I don’t think it has anything to do with proper understandings or not. I’m not standing in the way of your getting yourself implanted, but don’t pressure me to follow and make out that our relationship will be nothing if we can’t see each others’ moods in lights and couple through a computer. I think it’s been good between us, and I’d like to keep thinking it’s been good, so leave if it’s not enough, but don’t try and trample my memories on the way out!”
“If it’s your work—”
“It’s not my work,” I said, before I thought better of it, but I’d got so far into the habit of being truthful with this man that I’d only just started not regretting the things I hadn’t told him. Fortunately he was not listening.
“Forces in Chicago and LA interface; they’ve got security circuits nobody could touch. This is a backwater here—but things could change, if people like you stop resisting—”
“People like me.”
“D’Inde’s people. He’s been the fanatic about keeping cops clear of the interface. Now he’s gone—I’m sorry, Lester, but he’s gone; I know you loved the Old Man—he was your mentor and father figure, but he’s gone, and the situation he based his opinion on is history, and when people’s opinions are based on history, they just become prejudice.”
“Not prejudice,” I said, suddenly exhausted. “We’re investigating a suicide—possible assassin virus. Something came through the ThrillNets, scrambled this woman’s implants, and she took a dive off her balcony. Maybe she’s not the only one.”
And then I was very glad that my net of beads hung dimly in my hand, for I surely would have responded to what I saw in his. Just for an instant they turned white, under powerful emotion—fear? anger?—and then back to yellow. His face showed nothing; quite possibly he did not know what had happened.
“Who’s on it?” he said. “Who picked it up?”
But for that flash I would have told him it was Glad. “Somebody new; a real bright pixel. Jepthe Levin. You’ll be hearing about him.”
He smiled. “I’d watch your back, then.”
Glad called me in to an interview booth on Friday—soundproofed, screened and monitored.
“We’ve known each other a long time,” she began, seeming at a loss. She was beadless; her face was strained, looking down at interlocked hands which pulled against each other. “If it had been anyone else but you, I wouldn’t be doing this, but we’ve worked together and we’re friends, and maybe there is another explanation—” She stopped, gathering herself.
“Remember you asked about the assassin and I told you I had nothing; I was lying—” another deep breath, “until I could decide what to do. Then I thought there are two people who could use that node, and if it weren’t you, you had to be warned. And then I started checking into your records more closely, and I didn’t know what to think—”
“You’ve left out something I need to know before this makes sense.”
She glanced at me again. Finding me too calm, I thought.
“Oh.” She said, “Yes—I think I found the thread for the assassin, and traced it back. One of the originating nodes was your home PC.”
On actually hearing it, I felt much less surprised, and much sicker than I thought I would. The sickness showing in my face made Glad relax slightly.
“You said ‘one’,” I said after a while.
“I haven’t—I haven’t traced the others back yet. I’ve been distracted. I’ve been looking into your records.”
She paused, significantly, watching me.
I took it straight: “I hope you appreciate art. The Chief and I spent days on those records.” She stared. “Try the name Julie Beaumont for the other half of the story. Don’t take the date of death as literal.”
“How about you tell me?” The cop again.
“I’m probably going to have forgotten details. It’s been almost twenty years, and I wasn’t in very good shape, then.” Glad’s face hardened slightly. I didn’t care; it might be an excuse for discrepancies between what I told her and what the records showed, but should appreciate what one could do with records from what D’Inde and I had done.
“Julie Beaumont was Juvenile S in the case trials that restricted mood implants into juveniles; you’ll remember that case.”
She nodded.
“I was Julie Beaumont.”
I’d said that more for effect than anything, but immediately saw that Glad had not until that moment realized the connection. She stared at me. “But—” I waited. She threw herself back into her chair and whistled through her teeth. “Now there’s something I need to know to make sense of this.”
“Alright. Julie Beaumont: fourteen years old, gifted and underprivileged; a troublemaker. School is understaffed and overcrowded, parents overextended with a disabled child needing ongoing therapy. Mood circuits are ideal for cases like this, the psychiatrists say. Quite cost effective, can be monitored through computer. Implants for a couple of years, until the upheavals of adolescence are over. Everything goes swimmingly until Juvenile S meets an older man who logs her onto a ThrillNet.” And suddenly I am no longer narrating, but remembering. Remembering him telling me what a lucky girl I was, and here’s how to bribe the policeman. Feeling hands tickling the back of my neck where only the doctors’ touched before. Feeling the little thud in the skull as the lead went in. And then—There aren’t words for it. Pleasure beyond description. I used up most of his allotment for the month, he said, while he simply sat and stared at my face. He’d never seen a human being look so happy. It made him feel strange, he said; made him understand that trying to make someone happy could be more than just an expected gesture with an expected return.
