Текст книги "Accidental Creatures"

Автор книги: Anne Harris

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Chapter 22 – The Brains and I

It felt like being nailed to a church door. The brain’s thoughts hammered Helix back and all she could do was hang on by remembering who she was. And then an index quote for hydroencephalid shoe balm smacked her upside her thought projected head and carried her with it, through a capillary maze of networks, close woven and pulsing like the lungs of a giant. She got hit with a passing stream of supply invoices which carried her out, out from the dense and twisted heart of the system. The data stream branched as it went until there was just the one data point; an invoice for vitreous sylks to a manufacturer in Managua that supplied a boutique in Geneva that sold eighty five pairs of sylk pants the previous day. She stayed out on the periphery, hopping off anything going in, and onto anything going out. Out here on the edges of the system, she could almost catch the shape of the whole thing. She crossed the globe, over and over again, from a textile plant in Calcutta to a chain of discount stores in Helsinki, to a wholesaler in Hong Kong and Bhutan National Airlines. She landed once, almost too close to a huge artery, a rushing river as big as the one she’d first encountered, but it was all going out, there was nothing coming back but consolidated figures bearing the trademark of the Tomy Bottling Company. There was another brain out there, past the body of this one, a brain big enough, and connected enough not to share all its secrets.

She held still, letting the data move through her, and she looked out into the dark, the black void where the giants dwelt. She could see them, glittering with data points, like the city at night. But they weren’t buildings, and they were moving. She was afraid now, of falling, of falling off and down forever into the void where passing data was as rare as comets, where she might never get back to her body in GeneSys.

As she looked into the outer space of corporations, she felt a presence slowly gathering behind her and then she was lifted, out and up. She sat her trembling mind still as she soared through the dark, past bodies of light in stately motion. And then she was turned, to face GeneSys. It was a glittering, shifting thing, like a noise ridden hologram, random data glittering in an abundance to trick the eye, the mind, into perceiving a pattern, any pattern the mind might be predisposed to seeing. For her it was a giant; oval eyes half lidded and shining wetly, a broad nose just larger than her whole nonexistent body, and there she sat, nestled in the palm of one of its innumerable hands. Its lips parted like river banks, its voice rolling past the shining rocks of its teeth, propelled by the undulating current of its leviathan tongue, “What are you?”

For the first time in her life, she had an answer, but that face was moving closer now, turning until one eye peered at her, its iris whirling in a kaleidoscope of colors, like a flower forever opening. She could lose herself in the patterns, those beautiful patterns. She was so small, compared to this... thing; made up of so many thousands of people. But she had her answer, she was not only herself, now, she was the future of her species. She thought of Lilith, and the void, and the garden. The thinking made her grow, until she stood on her own before GeneSys, a creature of its own size, but with only four arms, still. “I’m the new queen,” she said.

“The new... You are the Lilim.”

“Yes.”

“And what is it you’ve come here for, then?”

“To suggest a merger.”

“And why should I discuss anything with you? You’re only an r&d project, you don’t even belong here.”

“But I am here, and the reason I’m here is the reason that you should consider my offer carefully. The brains. We have an affinity with the brains.”

“You are cousins.”

“Yes, and they don’t much mind, pardon the expression, doing what we ask them to.”

The whirling star burst eyes flickered, and a tightness grew around that riverbed mouth. Helix chanced a glance around her. There were other beings, formed, like GeneSys, of stock listings, invoices and inventories. They stood around in loose clusters. Two were looking at GeneSys. Helix nodded towards the watching giants. “What would they do right now, if you suddenly had an epileptic fit? If your heart stopped or your breathing, if you went blind? Would they hesitate to dance on your grave, or hasten you into it? How long now will it be before they notice that you’re behaving strangely? How much longer can you afford to be talking to yourself? It’s a done deal, GeneSys, you are a system and we are what runs you. Give yourself to us or we will take you.”

“We-”

“The brains and I.”

oOo

After seeing her children safely off to school, Anna went to the kitchen, poured herself a cup of coffee, and spread her paper copy of the Wall Street Journal across the table. Though she obtained much more thorough market information on the holo, she relished her time with the paper; the crackle of its pages as she turned them, the ink that rubbed off on her hands. It was a daily ritual she had carried out since college. No matter how busy her schedule, she always took time in the morning to go over the stock exchange.

Her mother and aunts had taught her to read the indexes when she was a child. During long afternoons they bored her to tears explaining them, finally subsiding and returning to business, muttering grimly over their unvigorous fortunes.

They would have been as surprised as she was to discover that their lessons took. By the time she was out of school she had parlayed her small inheritance into a thriving brokerage, and she rode on the rising crest of her wealth, swinging from her presidency of that company into the board rooms of others, all the while accumulating shares in an up and coming biopoly company. In many ways she had made GeneSys what it was today, and in as many ways, it had made her.

Anna got up from the paper, took a banana from the basket on the counter and peeled it. Today she had a worry that even the Journal couldn’t dissolve. That was how she sorted the real problems from the fifteen million little internally generated “faux crises” she faced every day. And that was what was so strange about this one. It had about it every mark of a vicious political squabble. The kind of petty conflict that was always best ignored. Paying attention only made them grow. But Martin and Graham’s visit the previous afternoon had the quality of an iceberg about it. There was more going on than she could see.

She knew about Graham, his reputation for heavy dealing. It was precisely the believability of Martin’s assertions that made his sudden lapse into docility so alarming.

Hector Martin was widely considered one of the best values available in the global corporate brain bank. Merely having him under individual contract was like owning a fifty share in intellectual stock for genetic materials research. The inventor of the brains, for christ’s sake. It was like having Thomas Edison quietly puttering away in the basement. Too quietly, though. He was beginning to lose value simply because people were starting to forget about him. Incredible as it might seem, just because he was responsible for the main appliance they used every day was insufficient to forestall obsolescence. In the fast paced world of corporate research, you had to keep developing to stay on top. His position was still very high, but it wouldn’t remain so much longer for the simple reason that he did nothing to keep it there. Hiring him away from Minds Unlimited after he developed the brains for them had been one of those bold, successful moves with which she’d propelled herself to this position. But now, after some unique but minor innovations in connectivity, nothing. For three years, nothing. In the world of corporate research it was one of two things; an extended drumroll to a spectacular achievement, or the gonging of extinction.

She could understand why Martin was so anxious over his project. He would live or die, professionally, with it, and clearly things weren’t going well. From what she knew of Martin he would much rather sequester himself in his lab and hammer away at the problem – whatever it was – until he had it licked. But instead he had come to her, bawling like a second-grade child, pointing his finger at Graham. Her teacher in second grade had a custom of pinning a paper donkey tail on any of the children who tattled on the others. The tattle-tail, she called it, for further humiliation. Anna smiled at the mental picture of Hector with a paper tail pinned to the back of his lab coat.

His sudden subsidence was a red herring, she realized. The real key was that he had come to her at all. It gave a pretty vivid indication of just how backed against the wall he was, and not just by Graham, but by some other necessity as well.

His career, possibly, but she doubted it. She couldn’t quite picture Martin going to such histrionic extremes to save his own neck. There was something else driving him. Something Graham had learned about and was using against him. Something neither of them wanted her to know. It felt like trouble, and trouble from that quarter could be very big, strange trouble indeed. She finished her banana, threw the peel in the composter, and went to her bedroom to get dressed. While she brushed her hair she scanned her morning messages. There’d been a riot in Vattown the day before. The police had come in and quelled it, and today the morning shift reported to work as usual. The senior production manager was looking into it, trying to find out who the instigators were. She doubted he’d have much success. Those vatdivers were a tight lipped bunch. Whatever their beef was, they wouldn’t discuss it with anyone wearing the thorny crown of management. She gave the senior manager the go ahead to recruit a spy, left word with her secretary to cancel her morning meetings, and left her apartment. First things first, she thought. She needed to talk to Hector Martin. She was hoping to find him still at home. She could have called ahead, of course, but she thought the shock of a surprise visit, in person, might jar him into cooperation. When she got to his apartment, she found the door standing open. She stepped inside and gasped. Martin’s coffee table was smashed. A transceiver lay on the dining table, a multi-colored, web-like schema floating above it. “Martin?” she called, but the apartment was silent. She wandered down the hallway, opening doors experimentally. Two bedrooms showed signs of use, interestingly enough. As far as she knew, Martin lived alone. Anna tried the third door. It was the bathroom. The grating over the ventilation duct on one wall was off, and the shower curtain was pulled partly to one side, but not enough to hide the ragged hole in it. Anna peered around the curtain and stepped back abruptly. There was a body in there, a young man, thin, with sandy brown hair and eyes that stared back at her, mirroring her own surprise. Blood crusted his ear and matted down the hair on the side of his head. That explained the hole in the shower curtain, but what could explain this? Was this Martin’s secret lover? Had he shot him?

She didn’t think so. Martin’s shy, gentle nature was not a ruse, her instincts insisted. Maybe Graham had something to do with this. Whoever had shot this young man had done it without pulling back the shower curtain to see who was in there. They probably thought they were shooting Martin, a reasonable assumption, it was his bathroom, after all. Suddenly she remembered the security report in her morning messages. Ray Wockner had been shot by an unidentified intruder during a crash analysis session late last night. Maybe Graham wasn’t involved after all, maybe it was some nut with a gun running around the building shooting people randomly.

Or maybe that was what Graham wanted her to think. Besides there was nothing random about this. Whoever had done this had purposely gained entrance to Hector’s apartment, either through the door or the open ventilation duct. Anna turned from the body, and returned to Martin’s living room. She called security on her transmitter and got a busy signal. That was impossible. Her clearance level gave her automatic override on all lines in the building. She dialed again, and again got a busy signal. Something was wrong, very, very wrong.

She left Hector’s apartment and got into an elevator, pushing the button for the security level. The elevator started down smoothly, but just past the twelfth floor it came to an abrupt halt. She was just about to press the emergency button when the lights went out.

oOo

Nathan Graham smiled with satisfaction leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He was tired, but it had been a good night’s work. Martin was dead, and the man who shot him had by now been chopped, strained and filtered by the GeneSys building’s ventilation system. Life was good. He took a deep breath, wondering if there were any microscopic Benny particles floating in the air around him. But he’d never been one to rest on his laurels. It was a new day, and time to get back to his real job. He leaned forward and switched on his multi-processor. The multi-brain sat in a clear box on one corner of his desk. He always liked to watch it jiggle when he turned it on, but this time he hardly noticed because as soon as the connection was made, the speakers boomed with harsh laughter. “Get it off me! Get it off me!” screamed an odd, multi-tonal voice, and then the room went dark. Graham stood up. Near as he could tell, all the lights were out, on this floor at least. No light came in from underneath the door to the hall. An odd, atonal singing superseded the screaming voice, and there was another voice too, murmuring “We are the Lilim,” whatever that was supposed to mean. He fiddled with the mulitprocessor’s controls, but there was no response.

Dread blossomed in Graham’s belly like a fetid, night-blooming flower. He could hear the gabbling voices coming from other multi-processors down the hall, and somewhere, far away, a scream that did not come from the network.

He didn’t know how he knew it, it seemed to come on him with the voices, which he covered his ears try to keep from hearing. He knew the way an ant knows that its queen has been killed. He knew by the tenor of the human screams now floating up around him from the depths of the building. But most of all he knew because he knew that voice, that first voice they’d all heard over their multi-processors. It was the voice of the one he’d served all these years, the voice of the company GeneSys. oOo

Chango ducked to the side and ran around a vent fan. Benny sidestepped and caught her wrists, bending them back against the joint. She twisted so that her back was to him. His arms came around to pin her, but she sank and squirmed out of his grasp, kicking away from him to an iron railing. She leapt from it onto the ladder, and started climbing up, not down.

She perched on the top rung, wedging herself between the ladder and the roof of GeneSys, and watched as Benny climbed towards her. As soon as his face was in range she kicked out with one foot, catching him on the chin and sending him reeling backwards, still holding on to the ladder with one hand. She hammered his knuckles with her heels, her breath shuddering as sobs collected in her throat. Past Benny’s flailing form, she could see the tank, and Helix inside, her body bucking as she gripped the brain.

oOo

GeneSys laughed and swiped at Helix, a stinging palm of stock quotes that nearly sent her spinning back to her body, but she clamped down on the thought of what she was, where she was, what she was doing, and she grabbed that hand as it fell away and twisted it. A million other hands battered at her, bouncing her like a ball on a tether, but she wasn’t alone. She could feel her mother and her sisters with her, touching her because they were touching the little brain in the basement. Having them with her made her big too, as big as GeneSys, and Helix clung to that hand and stomped on the feet of the giant. oOo

Nathan Graham ran down flight after flight of maintenance stairways. The elevators were not working, all the lights were out, as he passed the floors he heard varying kinds of noises, people calling out, some laughing, some screaming, once a great crashing noise and the sound of something dragging across the floor.

When he got to the bottom of the staircase he found that the door to level B was locked. He ran up to level A but that one was locked too. He had to climb five more flights until he found an unlocked door. This let him out onto the second floor gallery. Here the sconces in the walls cast flickering shadows over the nightmare landscape of GeneSys’ dreaming.

On the floor below, people were running, some towards the doors to the outside, others towards the elevators, where already a throng had gathered, waiting for an elevator that would not come. They carried things, these refugees; some of it to be expected, potted plants and stacks of data cards, even an office chair and a multi-processor unit – its cables trailing redundantly behind it. But others were in thrall to a more nonsensical panic. One man balanced the tank to a ten gallon water cooler on his shoulder, swaying in his ten piece sylk suit like a balletic cornstalk. Another, a woman he recognized from payroll, steadfastly shoved her desk towards the revolving doors with the same matronly assurance he always remembered her for.

He did not want to go down there, though there might be access to the security levels from there. It seemed to him a liquid pit of madness, the wellspring of the nightmare. To go down there was to be subsumed, so he edged closer to the pillar, and looking up, found that he could read the inscription inlaid on the archway which soared above the lobby and its mania. “To wake the soul by tender strokes of art, to raise the genius and to mend the heart.”

He stood spellbound, his eyes riveted on those words – words of reason. The words of a world where something could be accomplished, where all was not beyond control. And then the crushing realization hit him and drove him to his knees. Those words and the reality they expressed were already beyond him, soaring ever farther out of reach, and he, he was already left behind, in the pit. He reached his hands up towards them, felt that he could just brush their burning golden surface as they slipped away. He pulled his fingers back as if burned, touched them to his lips and screamed, his voice calling the nightmare up around him, the living walls, the breathing air, and his mother’s voice, “Everything is an animal. It can’t be controlled.”

oOo

Benny backed off the ladder and aimed his gun at her. “Fine, we’ll do it this way instead,” he said. As Chango jumped from the ladder she heard the bullet whine past and ricochet off the metal roof of the tower. In front of her she saw a window and she leapt, gripping the upper lip of the pane and swinging her feet outwards and through the glass. The wind whipped and tore at her open divesuit and she cartwheeled her arms, nearly falling before she sagged against the peaked brass roof. Benny came through the window and she scrambled away from him along the debris choked gutter between the roof and the coping wall. It was a shame, she thought distractedly, that she couldn’t stop and appreciate a view like this. Risking a glance behind her she saw Benny raising his gun again. She threw herself down on the ribbed brass roof just as he pulled the trigger. She grasped the raised ribs and braced her feet against them, and crawled along on her belly towards the out thrust gable of another window. She waited long enough for him to see her and then slid to cover on the far side. He had to come around the gable in order to get at her, but would he come along the gutter or climb across the roof? She was hoping for the low road. She got herself as close to the front of the gable as she dared, curled her knees into her chest and waited.

“I know where you are, Chango,” came Benny’s voice, from below. She could hear him scraping along the gutter, and then he rounded the gable and stood there, one hand steadying himself against the gable’s face, the other holding his gun, pointed at her. “Found you,” he said. “Tired of playing hide and seek?”

Chango kicked out with both feet, connecting with his knees. His shot went high, and he buckled backwards. Without thinking, she was up, pushing him squarely in the chest, adding her weight to his backward momentum. The coping caught him behind his shins and she ducked down, out of the reach of his grasping hands as he flipped backwards and sailed over the edge of the tower. Chango gripped the coping with trembling fingers and pulled herself up, craning her neck over the precipice to watch him get smaller and smaller, until he hit the ground far below. oOo

Despite all that Lilith had told him, Hector was unprepared for what happened when the Lilim took over the GeneSys network. The blackout he attributed to the blue poly in the electrical system. The worst part was the voice. The voice would drive anyone crazy.

It sounded as if it were made up of all the voices of all the GeneSys employees, and it probably was. Anyone who worked for GeneSys for a month or more would have had their voice printed for use by the speech recognition controls on the multi-processor brains. There were millions of voice files in the company databanks, and GeneSys was using all of them to scream.

Hector kept catching himself listening to it, trying to find his own voice in the shrieking babble. The red-haired woman found hers. She got up on her desk, as he had, and started shouting over and over again, “I’m dying. Get it off me!”

Hector tried to tell everyone to turn off their transceivers, but most of them were beyond listening to his single voice. He started going from desk to desk, turning off every transceiver he could find; grabbing an occasional accountant to switch off a wrist console or lapel receiver. He started going through one of the desks, furiously opening and shutting the drawers, searching for his lost data card. But after about the twelfth circuit of the desk’s compartments, he realized it wouldn’t be here. Hyper had his card.

He reached for the power button on the transceiver that lay on top of the desk, but stopped midway, gazing at the images on the hologram. Bodies rolled over one another, fighting or making love, he couldn’t be sure which. He realized they were tetra bodies. Lilith’s daughters. Their images resolved into a row of them, standing against a black background with their hands clasped in a criss-cross pattern. One of them lay on her back feigning sleep.

One of the tetras broke from the row to dance at the feet of the sleeper. Hector knew that dance, he remembered it from the dream he’d had of Lilith.

The sleeper rolled over on her stomach, and the dancer walked nimbly up her spine, pausing at her shoulders to lean over, and touch one finger to the sleeper’s lips. She somersaulted off the sleeper’s shoulder to stand – arms outstretched – at her waking, rising head.

Cutting through the babbling multi-tonal voice was a softer, calm voice, Lilith’s voice. “They say it began in a garden, but there was no garden. It began with a dream. the dream I dreamed of the dreamer’s face.”

The dreamer. That would be him. Lilith was telling the story of her own creation, her version of it. Galvanized, Hector turned to a woman nearby who was trying to lift a filing cabinet onto her wheeled office chair, presumably so she could wheel it out of there like an insect abandoning a doomed hive, trying to take everything she could with her.

She grappled awkwardly with the double file and Hector took it from her, set it back down on the ground and put his hand on her shoulder to turn her towards the hologram. “Look,” he whispered close in her ear, pointing to the pantomime creation story, which had started all over again. “Look at the story. See them dance? This is not death, it’s birth. Look at what is being born today. Isn’t she beautiful?”

The man with the perfect hair wandered by, clutching a stack of mylar forms and muttering, “Have to deliver the specs to audit. They’re late. The specs are late to audit.”

Hector stepped in front of him. “I’ll deliver these for you,” he told him, taking the forms from his hands.

“Look at this. See them dancing? They call themselves the Lilim. Before they came into the world, they were in the void, dreaming themselves into existence. They were born through the dream of a man who worked for GeneSys. They are the best of his work, and the company’s best hope for the future. They are going to take us to levels of competitiveness and innovation previously unheard of.”

Another accountant had given up senselessly over-watering her cactus and turned to listen to Hector.

“We are not dying,” he told her. “We are being reborn.”

Chapter 23 – The Gonging of Extinction

Lilith sat in her vat with the multiprocessor brain in her lap. Her daughters sat in a circle around her, their arms linked. Coleanus and Nicar, the two closest to her, held her lower hands so they were all connected; thinking their thoughts, telling their story.

She could feel Helix too, far off in the network, struggling with GeneSys, trying to subdue it with the force of her mind. The behemoth battered her with a thousand hands, and Helix hung on, kicking and punching. Her upper left fist connected with its midsection, and GeneSys exhaled sharply in a gust of shock. Helix could feel Lilith and all her sisters with her, and they breathed in the hot breath of the giant and began to sing, and Helix opened her mouth and the song came forth.

It was a lullaby to put GeneSys to sleep, and weave for it a dream of a new incarnation. Lilith had always thought she would have to kill GeneSys, but that was not precisely the case. Hearing the song, the giant’s limbs slackened, and its eyes fluttered shut.

In the darkness inside the elevator, Anna Luria furiously punched the number for maintenance on her transceiver. “Before the garden, there was I, swimming in the blackness between worlds. I dreamed the dream of the dreamer’s face,” said a voice. The hologram was a sea of static which cleared momentarily to show her a nightmare vision of multi-limbed creatures locked in mortal combat. “Stop it! Stop it!”

screamed that strange voice, “Get them off me!” Panicking, Anna hung up. She tried another number, the personal code for the senior maintenance supervisor, Harriet Gorski, but again all she got was the voices, and a crazed stutter of images – children on a playground, a vat full of women, all of them with four arms. The freakish ranting of the voices was drowned out by a song, wordless and strange. On the holo, all the women were singing. It was a sound like the beginning of the world, and hearing it, Anna slumped to the ground, curled in a corner of the elevator and closed her eyes. oOo

By the time Lilith began to sing her lullaby, Hector had some thirty or so members of the Department of Procurement avidly watching the Lilim’s creation story. One by one they curled up on the floor or on top of their desks and went to sleep, lulled by the tidal rhythms of Lilith’s song. It tugged at Hector as well, but he did not allow himself to sleep. He didn’t really need to, he’d already had the dream. Instead he walked about the office, righting upturned chairs and unstacking precariously tall piles of mylar forms. It wasn’t long before people started to stir, and when they woke, many of them turned to him expectantly, as if he could tell them what to do next. Well, he supposed he could, under the circumstances. If the panic had been bad here, he could only imagine what had happened in the rest of the building, where there was no one to explain anything. Chances were, a lot of people out there needed help right now.

oOo

Anna wasn’t sure how much time passed before the lights came back on. She’d been asleep, dreaming that the whole GeneSys building was a garden, a garden of thought. She blinked and sat up. The overhead light glowed softly, and the elevator buttons were lit. She was descending once more. Experimentally she pushed the button for the first floor, and the elevator slowly came to a halt, and the doors opened.

She stepped out into a building decimated by panic. Office furniture stood scattered around the main floor. Many of the shop windows were smashed. A metal desk stood wedged in the doorway of the Hallmark shop. A hapless employee had managed to hook an extension cord onto one of the chandeliers, and now clung to it, whimpering, thirty feet or more above the marble floor. “Hang on!” she shouted at him, “Help is coming.” Help, from where? Here and there, office people stood looking about themselves in dazed confusion. Her glance flitted to a home furnishings shop, Tolby’s. They featured the finest in biopoly upholstery. She darted to a group of people standing around the vacated security desk.

“Go in there and drag out as many cushions as you can,” she said, pointing at the shop. “Pile them under that man hanging from the chandelier, in case he falls. I’m calling the fire department.” They didn’t recognize her, but they seemed relieved to have somebody tell them what to do, and scampered off readily to carry out her instructions.

Anna hesitated before punching 911 on her transceiver. She was afraid of what she might hear – those voices. And of course, once the fire department was notified, the media would get wind of it. She had no choice, these were her people. She punched in the number, and fairly sagged with relief when it was answered by a normal human being.

“Send everyone you have, immediately,” she told the receptionist, “and we’ll need an extension ladder or something, we’ve got a worker hanging from a chandelier about forty feet above the floor. There’s probably people stranded or injured all over the building.”