Strange Trades (20 page)

His mother greeted him at the door with a shriek and a hug, while his father grunted a surly greeting from his perpetual seat in front of the holotank. With younger brothers and sisters clinging to his knees, Rafe proudly made his announcement.

“I have an agent now, Mama.”

His mother’s happy face registered disbelief, and his father’s grunt took on a distinctly insulting tone. Rafe strode forward, ordered the holotank to switch channels, and summoned his agent into it.

“
Madre de Dios!
” his mother cried. His father shot to his feet faster than Rafe had ever seen him move.

“Out!” said his father. “Get out! There is no way you could have gotten this
espectro
legally. Are you
tonto
, bringing it here to implicate your family in your foolish schemes? Leave—now!”

Rafe left.

A day later, Rafe ran into Tu Tun out on Avenue B. His friend’s reaction to his massive coup was less threatening than that of his parents, but hardly more flattering.

Tun was busy applying a fixative to his latest mural when Rafe came up behind him. A skinny kid of Cambodian ancestry, with a coarse mop of black hair and a crooked smile, Tun, otherwise Toots, swung around from his work to face Rafe.

“Hey, Rafe, how do you like it?”

Rafe inspected the polychrome collage of the latest pop icons, and expressed his unqualified approval. Then, from a nearby metamedium outlet, he called up Agent Miraflores.

“Meet my agent, Toots.”

Tun looked the agent up and down with no particular excitement, finally saying, “Yeah, pretty good, man. I see a lot of agents uptown now. Gonna get one myself any day now.”

Rafe stalked off, burning with a peculiar embarrassed anger he had never known before.

Soon after that, Rafe decided it would be nice to earn a little credit with his agent. His fictitious general-purpose license didn’t allow his agent to do any specialized work, but there were plenty of people who needed research done. This involved the agent in conducting searches of the metamedium for specified information—searches which in olden times would have cost a human days or weeks of tedious browsing through datastructures—and delivering the report in oral form, or causing the results to be printed.

Rafe hired out his agent for several such tasks, and enjoyed for the first time in his life a source of credit other than the Net. However, while his agent was engaged in the service of others, Rafe was left alone, bored and prone to smoke too much dope, and might have just as well been agentless, for all the use he could make of the metamedium.

After a few such contracts, Rafe went back to utilizing his agent strictly for his own enjoyment. He felt satisfied with his complete mastery of the metamedium, and dared anyone to match him at it.

Not, of course, that there weren’t a few little unforeseen glitches.

When Rafe had first contacted his agent after returning from the legger’s, it had been only a voice that requested him to turn 360 degrees in front of the metamedium node, so that his likeness could be stored. After Rafe complied, his agent had subsequently materialized as his reflection. Rafe’s mannerisms, expressions and speech patterns were stored in later encounters, and employed thereafter.

Lately, however, the agent seemed to be slipping. Occasionally, it would appear momentarily as someone else: a baby-faced stranger with round wire-rimmed glasses and a frightened look. At such times, Rafe had to order it to assume his own likeness.

Then there were the times the agent simply refused to respond. Rafe would utter his code into a metamedium connection futilely, waiting for some response that never came. When he questioned his agent about these failures, his agent responded that there must be some bug in the voice-verification routines that had to be passed before an agent was invoked.

Rafe had his doubts about this explanation, but, remembering the Three Laws, had to assume that his agent was telling the truth.

Hey, what else could it be? Was it likely
el espectro
was occupied with business of its own?

Rafe had to laugh at the very idea.

One afternoon, Rafe, returning from a thoughtful walk, stood in the corridor, outside the door to his apartment.

From within came the muted sound of two voices.

Rafe ordered his door open.

His agent stood arguing with another. The second apparition was that of one of the most beautiful women Rafe had ever seen.

When Rafe’s agent saw him, it ceased talking and disappeared. The female agent turned to Rafe, looked disconcertingly at him for a long moment, then also vanished.

The next time Rafe managed to get ahold of his own agent, he decided to take an oblique approach to the topic.

“Hey, man,” he spoke to his agent, “that was some good-looking
chica
you were with. How about you share her name and address with me?”

His agent regarded Rafe with a curious air of defiance, as if debating whether to comply or not. The fact that it was Rafe’s own face wearing the hostile look made the whole scene even more unreal.

At last, the agent spoke.

“Evelyn Maycombe. Three thirty-four Central Park West.”

13.

Perry Mason Never Had Such Headaches

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: my honorable opponent would have you believe that society is at fault in this case, rather than his client. He quotes—from a musty work of fiction—three fanciful laws regarding how a robot should behave, and contrasts them to the actual Three Laws Governing Agents, which he finds deficient, insofar as they do not prohibit agents from harming humans. Naturally, he would take this tack, as his client stands accused of—and in fact has admitted—ordering his agent to override the airlock controls in the Johnson and Johnson Pharmaceutical Orbital Facility while his unsuited victim was making a routine inspection.

“What my honorable opponent does not mention is that the very stories he relies on—as holding forth missing safeguards which our society has negligently failed to implement—instead, to the contrary, illustrate through several ingenious instances that these hypothetical laws were so full of loopholes that they were worse than useless. They offer no protection from the use of agents in a homicide or theft, or even in unintentional physical or financial wrongdoing.

“No, ladies and gentlemen, our current software restrictions on agents—along with the associated legal framework—are all we need to adjudicate such cases as we have before us. Remember:

“An agent obeys only a single overseer, who is legally responsible for its actions. An agent is a tool, no more responsible for the consequences of its own actions than a screwdriver or space shuttle.

“And that is why I ask you to return a verdict in this case of death followed by organ dispersal, so that the man whose agent sits before you now may repay his debt to the society he has offended.…”

—Transcript of the prosecutor’s closing speech in
L-5 Jurisdictional Area v. Hayworth

14.

In the Metamedium, Part Three

Probability of recognition by Agent Maycombe: 98.64… Probability no action opposed to my survival will be taken: 01.04… Reshuffle goal stack… Active task is now: terminate… Object (prime): Agent Maycombe… Object (secondary): Overseer Maycombe… Jump, jump, jump…

15.

The Monkey’s Heart

She had it.

The rogue agent was good as snared.

First had come the breakthrough in strategy. Next, the inspired sleuthing by her agent, tracing the myriad, myriad tangled threads of the metamedium until they led back to Agent Miraflores, aka Agent Freundlich, aka the biggest bomb ever planted to nerve-rackingly tick away in the core of the metamedium.

For weeks, Evelyn Maycombe had worried about how she would disable Freundlich’s former agent, if she ever found it. Its first—and entirely understandable—impulse, when confronted with any suspicious actions, seemed to be to subvert the accosting agent and then order it to desist. Therefore, she had instructed her own agent not to seek initially to disable the rogue—which was within her powers as a representative of the NSA—but merely to make a positive—and subtle—identification of it. Even that, she feared, might be enough to provoke it to action. She could only hope, at this point, that her agent would return intact.

Meanwhile, during the seemingly endless search, Evelyn pondered how to prevent her own agent from turning traitor.

Evelyn had been listening to a favorite recording one night, seeking to divert her mind from the problem and give her subconscious a chance to come up with something. The recording was one of a collection of African folktales. Evelyn loved myths and folktales of all kinds, but tonight the usual magic seemed lacking.

Until the narrator said… and the monkey hid his heart away in a nut, so that he might never die.…”

If Evelyn could have leapt with excitement about the room, she surely would have. As it was, she merely crooned in a low-key manner hardly indicative of her joy.

What was the heart of an agent? Its ethical nucleus. Where did the rogue strike? At this very heart. Okay. The nucleus had to remain at its predetermined location within each agent, so that the metamedium supervisor could inspect it for tampering. But nothing prevented her from inserting code into her agent to accomplish one simple thing.

She would order her agent to access the master library copy of the ethical nucleus every few machine cycles. If the one in place differed from the master, her agent would perform a heart transplant: overlay the sabotaged nucleus with the master one. Unless the rogue happened to catch on very quickly, it would in effect turn its back on what it deemed a defeated foe, only to find an enemy there nanoseconds later.

When Evelyn’s agent returned that night to report, she instructed it in the new trick.

Only the waiting was left.

And now even that was over.

Her agent had just materialized with the news that it had conclusively identified the rogue. Unhesitatingly, Evelyn had told her agent to bring Freundlich in.

Having issued the order, she sat in her automated chair, bright summer sunlight swaggering into her apartment, her feelings a mixture of nervousness and premature pride in the capture.

A ping issued from the metamedium node in the wall opposite her position. She spun her chair to watch her agent materialize. A fraction of a second after, Agent Freundlich appeared.

Evelyn was surprised to see the appearance Freundlich was masquerading under. The holo of the young Hispanic male was hardly a fit mask for the dire threat beneath. Still, she supposed the original Freundlich had looked no more evil. She, of anyone, should know just how little appearances counted for. Look at the mind that hid inside her shattered carcass.

Her agent seemed to have everything under control. Freundlich stood complacently, making no overt moves.

Evelyn was about to order her agent to put a few questions to the rogue before disabling it, when it happened.

Her own agent fluttered visibly, and what could only be construed as an expression of pain passed over its shining features.

At the same second, Evelyn’s chair accelerated out of her control, heading toward the wall.

She slammed violently into the unyielding wall, catapulting forward and hitting her head against the plaster surface. Pain subsumed her consciousness, and a red haze washed over her.

When she came to her senses, she lay flat on the floor, her chair some distance away. Using all her feeble strength, she raised her head toward her agent.

The holo of Freundlich had her agent’s holo by the throat in a stranglehold, the simulacra routines shadowing forth the incomprehensible struggle that raged within the metamedium. Every few seconds her agent would recover, as it restored its heart, but it seemed incapable of doing any more than holding its own.

In the intervals when Freundlich had control of her agent, it was triggering the agent-activated devices in her automated apartment, in a frantic attempt to control her chair.

Water shot from faucets in the sink and soon spilled over the bowl. The refrigerator door opened, and the arm inside hurled bottles out to crash on the floor. She could hear the massage bed humping itself crazily in the next room. The heating system came on, and the temperature began to soar. The holotank blared forth “The Edge of Desire.”

On and on the battle raged, as Evelyn watched helplessly.

At last she saw the heavy wheels of her chair begin to move.

16.

A Lever to Shift the World

Any medium powerful enough to extend man’s reach is powerful enough to topple the world.

—
Twentieth Century Archives: Scientific American
, Alan Kay, September 1984

17.

On His Magnetic Silver Steed

Directly after cajoling the woman’s name from his agent, Rafe watched in amazement as his agent disappeared.