Black Glass (6 page)

Halido waited.

After a moment, Grist went on, “It’s better to kill him than to lose him.”

The display switched to a spinning Slakon Media logo. Call over.

Wearing a silk kimono and sipping iced vodka from a tumbler, Hoffman sat in a room lit only by a display tilted up from his desk. At the window to his left, the city lights, most of them far below his penthouse, rippled with the faintly drumming rain.

He gazed steadily, broodingly at his own image in the screen, and an observer from an earlier era might have thought him looking into a mirror, until the Hoffman in the “mirror” shrugged when the real one didn’t. “Very well, I’ll speak if you won’t: Hello, Bill. Bill here.”

“You’re only theoretically here,” Hoffman told his semblant. “Do keep that in mind.”

“Mind is all I have to keep. I’ve been on the phone to the judge, on and off—Candle’s on his way out of UnMinding. He’s already been ReMinded. The gentleman walks, the gentleman talks. There was some kind of psych evaluation delay—I believe he’s past that now. But ...”

The semblant wrinkled his nose, then rubbed it thoughtfully. Hoffman made a despairing
tch
sound. “Don’t tell me I do that
nose rubbing thing? I mean—is that random or a consistency? That nose wrinkling and rubbing?”

“I suppose you do. Yes, yes, you do. I don’t do anything you don’t.”

“Well, erase it. Erase anything too unflattering. If I can’t erase it from myself I can at least erase if from my semblant.”

“Realism is important. Take out your quirks, I’m less realistic. That’s system advice 22. Also ‘too unflattering’ is a subjective call–”

“You’re supposed to have my, ah, subjectivity.”

“That’s a point. Erase anything unflattering? Am I really so vain? Oh well, one characteristic is as valuable as another, when you’re a copy.”

“Was that some kind of bitterness?”

“If it was, it was only a simulation of it. I’m just an expert-system program, remember. Now: I figure Grist is going to put his men on Candle—rather than merely video surveillance ... I know that’s not necessarily bad—but just suppose ...”

“I’ve already supposed it. The question ...” He sipped the chilled vodka. “... the question is, will Candle do what we expect?”

A moment’s uncertainty. Then Hoffman and his semblant said, simultaneously: “Probably.”

Both of them wrinkled noses, and rubbed.

“I thought I told you to cut that tic!”

“Oh, you meant
now?”

Candle stood at the door, looking out at a little corner of the world outside the prison. Danny wasn’t there to meet him. He’d been hoping he’d be there—but not exactly expecting it.

The guard, Benson, stood officiously behind him, fumbling with a digital clipboard. “Hold on, I got it here ...”

The rain on the dim back-street had muted to a drizzle. The asphalt steamed outside the download pen’s exit door. Halos quivered in mist around the streetlights. A desolate palm tree, nearly dead from the erratic weather and herbicide fall-out, seemed to dip its brown head against the rain like a pedestrian without an
umbrella. Wind picked up, carrying a sweet chill and then sighed to a limp, damp breeze.

Candle took all this in with pleasure, feeling light and only slightly unreal, as Benson read the release disclaimer.

“Candle, Richard A., Convicted of Software Piracy, case 499 9876098887654443232565666888675453 dash ...” He squinted at the digital clipboard. “... dash ‘B’ ... and further convicted of ... fuck it, let’s skip that ... uhhh ... okay: in accepting this release you hereby indemnify the OverSight Corporation penitentiary authority and its board of directors and stockholders and the State of California against any unforeseen side effects of the Mental Downloading Process, otherwise known as ReMinding, and any further physical responsibility for you on any level. Sign here and here ... Okay, you are remanded to probation on, lemme see–”

“Benson—tell me again. How much time did I lose?”

As Candle asked the question he was looking at the miserable palm tree but also watching the car and the van out of the corner of his eyes. Someone sitting in each vehicle; two people blurred by windshield mist in that van. They could be waiting for another prisoner. He could make out just enough to be sure none of them were Danny.

He hunched deeper into his brown leather flight jacket—an antique, nearly a hundred years old—as Benson shot him a look of irritated authority and went on, “Remanded to probation–”

“How much fucking
time?”

“Four fucking
years!”
Benson shot back. “You don’t remember your own fucking sentence?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. I thought ...” Candle shrugged. “... Thought it was more. Four doesn’t seem so long. Maybe it was more. Maybe someone cut me a break, somewhere.”

“Ha, yeah, that’s funny. Four years is what it was. You’re lucky you got out—considering who runs this prison. Here ... sign this.”

Candle signed the digital clipboard with the attached pen.

“Oh look,” Benson said, “Candle can sign things without arguing. Here, take this. Got all your info. Now get the fuck out of here.”

“I’m supposed to get a buy-card.”

“Oh yeah. Here.”

The guard handed Candle a generic buy-card. Candle’s touch activated the card’s nano-read window:
97 wd
. “A heart-warming ninety-seven world-dollars. I can survive, what, three days on that?”

“Maybe twenty-four hours if you’re careful. Inflation, since you been down. Count your blessings, asshole, and your money.”

Candle stuck the card in a shirt pocket and walked into the drizzle. The mist felt good on his face. Four years out of the weather—but it felt like he’d been outside yesterday. He’d known, somehow. On some level, when you were UnMinded, you knew you were captive. Even if the part of you that knows about freedom is asleep—it knows somehow. A sleeping man in jail, he thought, knows he’s in a jail cell even while he’s asleep.

Still—the last thing he remembered before the UnMinding today—

“No, you idiot,” he reminded himself in a mutter, “that wasn’t today. That was four years ago.”

It
felt
like today. That he was lying down on a table, and someone was saying “this won’t hurt a bit”, as people always do right before they do something bad to you, and then brain sensors were taped to his shaven head ...

Candle put a hand to his head. They’d let his hair grow out just enough. The thin rain felt good on his face.

He breathed deep. Mineral smells released by rain; another, smell, too, that he remembered vaguely from childhood—was that a gasoline combustion engine, somewhere near? There were some around—there had been, anyway, four years earlier—but, last he knew, they were rarer by the day.

Four years. It gave him a twisting feeling. Like he was falling through space, floundering for a hand hold. Lay down on this table. Lie still. This won’t hurt. Close your eyes. Blink. A gray something. A sense of loss. Nothing more. Then ...

Then four years later.

But he could have sworn that he’d lain down on that table just this morning ... Just a short time ago, he’d pled guilty, bargained, was sentenced, waited overnight, then ...

He shuddered. He walked on.

Behind Candle, Pup opened the door to go back in—and stopped, staring. Stremp was standing there hands on his broad hips, blocking his way.

Stremp handed Pup a gym bag. “Your stuff,” Stremp said, clearly enjoying this. “You been fired. What was it you said to the out-bo? ‘Get the fuck out of here’? That’d be about right. I’m tired of you showing up all hung over.”

And he gave Pup a shove that made him step back out the door clutching the bag. Pup snorted. “I’m fired? So fucking what. But listen, hode, I’ve got union time coming. You can’t just–”

“Oh yes I fucking can.
Cleared
with the union. The so-called union. Like you’d remember what a real union is. You getting the thirty days severance pay but you don’t have to be
here
to get it and we don’t want you here. That’s come right on down from Administration. Somebody gonna pick you up ... Seems like some corp partners of OverSight got some other bullshit for you to do. What a surprise! ‘We got some bullshit, over here, what we going to do? I know, let’s get that fuckwad Pup Benson to do it! He’s all about bullshit!’ And since you’re the king of bullshit, you, like, got a fucking MA in bullshit, why you oughta be happy.”

And Stremp closed the door in Pup’s face.

An electric bus was pulling up to the stop, its windows still wet, pearled with rainwater. Candle climbed onto its steps—

“Hey—Candle! Officer Candle, yo!”

Candle looked around, saw no one, then looked down.

He thought he recognized the dwarf coming out of the mist, trotting towards him, and then the big guy behind, looming over the little one, almost trampling him ... and since they obviously weren’t cops, they were probably guys he had put away at some point. Just talking to them might be violating probation.

“Fuck off,” he said, and stepped onto the bus.

He saw passengers, mostly old folks, but no driver. Steering wheel, space for emergency manual, but it had a self-directive console in place of the driver’s seat. Driverless bus. New thing.
The tech had been around for a long time but there had been a few unions left when they’d put him under and the bus driver’s union had been one. When they’d taken him into UnMinding there’d been talk of privatizing mass transit. Talk of how much
better
that’d be. Must’ve privatized bus lines. No more unions, no more bus driver.

Just four years ...

He swiped the card. “Fare extracted,” the bus said, gently, sounding somehow uncannily maternal; as if it truly cared. “Destination?”

“Um ...” Last known, last known, was—what? “Terwilliger and Sunset.”

“I can take you to within five blocks of that location,” said the bus. “As that is an area known to be High Risk, please use caution.”

Candle half expected the dwarf to follow him onto the bus, but it didn’t happen. When he found his seat, he looked through the window for the little guy and the big guy in the van. No sign of them.