Strange Trades (17 page)

No one bothered him. He had one tape. Steely Dan. He listened to “Bad Sneakers” over and over:

Do you take me for a fool, do you think that I don’t see

That ditch out in the valley that they’re digging just for me?

Howie looked at the door of his stall. He contemplated going out. He thought about contacting the authorities. What could he say to them that wouldn’t add to the noise level? No, everything seemed like too much trouble. Turning his head, he saw new graffiti that someone must have written during one of his visits to the concession stand:

BOG LIVES!

Howie felt sick. The light hurt his eyes.

Without warning, he heard the outer door of the lavatory open.

The footsteps of two people sounded. He smelled cigarette smoke.

Shoes appeared outside his stall, below the partition.

A man’s pair. A woman’s.

Howie waited for the owners of the shoes to speak.

“Gibbons procreate moonily hung slick over wildly called tales,” said the man.

“Come out, Howie,” said the woman. “Merde. Fuck. Christ on a crutch.”

Do you remember a time before the Internet and the Web? It wasn’t all that long ago, although of course that faded day and age seems an eternity away. In those olden days, we struggling SF writers had a hard time pinning down the lines of the silicon creature yet to be born. And today, for instance, we still don’t have William Gibson’s cyberspace in its full “consensual hallucination” form. Nonetheless, a few of us sensed that something big was on the way. In this story, I tried to envision our digital future fairly rigorously, resulting in a mix of hits (the lower classes becoming digital have-nots) and near misses (“Net” as the term for the welfare system). Maybe I upped my lifetime predictive batting average a little. In any case, I had fun with the story and hope it still works despite its unfulfilled prophecies, as another of my “little guy’s reach exceeds his grasp, but what’s a heaven for?” tales.

Agents

1.

The ABCs of Avenue D

What the hell did a guy with cojones need two real lungs for anyway?

Rafael Ernesto Miraflores asked himself this far-from-hypothetical question as he sauntered with mock bravado down Avenue D toward his appointment at the chop-shop. His chest already felt empty, as if a bloody-handed butcher had scooped out his lights with a laugh and a swipe. A stiff wire of cold seemed to have been rammed up his spine beside his nerve sheath, as if the metamedium—not content with already occupying his every waking thought—had somehow infiltrated its superconducting threading into his very body. He felt really lousy, for sure, wondering if he was doing the right thing. But what other choice did he have, if he wanted an agent?

And want one he most certainly did. Not only was one’s own agent the source of an intrinsic fascination and status, but it represented vast power, a way out of the Net.

Too bad Rafe was going to have to step outside the law to get one.

Overhead, the hot summer sun hung in the smogless New York sky like an idiot’s blank face, happy in its ignorance of Rafe’s troubles. No indication of whether he had made the right choice seemed forthcoming from that direction, so Rafe swung his gaze back down to the street.

Avenue D itself was filled with pedestrians, Rafe’s fellow dwellers in the Net. Occasionally, a small, noiseless electricart threaded its way among them, bearing its official occupant on some arcane business an agent couldn’t handle. Below Rafe’s feet, the mag-lev trains rushed through their vacuum chutes like macroscopic models of the information surging through the meta- medium.

Rafe checked out the latest pop murals adorning the monolithic, windowless residences lining both sides of the Avenue. He thought he recognized the styles of several friends who were experts with their electrostatic splatterers. One caricature of a big-breasted
chica
—who resembled the metamedium star Penny Layne—Rafe recognized as the work of his friend, Tu Tun, whom all the uptown culture-vultures were already acclaiming as the hottest wall-artist to watch. Rafe felt just a little jealous of Toot’s growing success, and how he would soon escape the Net.

And without selling so much as a quart of blood.

Shit! For an instant, he had managed to forget where he was heading. Now the imminent sacrifice he was about to offer on the altar of twenty-first century commerce swept over him in all its gory glory.

It wasn’t that Rafe had anything against prosthetics, like the huge cohort of old-fashioned elderly citizens born in the last century, who clamored for real-meat implants. He knew that his artificial lung with its tiny power source would be more reliable than his real one, unscarrable and efficient. No, it was just that he believed in leaving well enough alone. Why mess with something if it was working okay? It seemed like extending an invitation to Bad Luck, a force Rafe recognized and propitiated with a solemn consistency.

But what other choice was there?

And hadn’t he already run up against this unanswerable question before?

Reaching the end of the block, Rafe stopped at the intersection. So absorbed in his thoughts had he been that he had to pause a minute to realize where he was.

It was East Fifth Street, his destination. The cross-town blocks here on the Lower East Side had been converted to playgrounds checkered with benches, trees, and floral plantings. Mothers watched their children dig in sandpits and clamber over jungle gyms that looked like molecule models. Old men played chess in patches of shade. A few lightweight, nonthreatening drug deals were consummated, customers and dealers clad alike in iridescent vests and slikslax.

Seeking to divert his nervousness, Rafe tried to imagine his familiar neighborhood as it had looked sixty years ago, when the first of his family had arrived as refugees from the Central American flare-up. Only Tia Luz remained alive from that generation, and the stories she told in her rambling fashion were hard to believe. Acres and acres of devastation, burnt-out buildings and rubble-filled lots, homeless people wandering the dirty streets, all in the midst of the world’s wealthiest city. It seemed impossible that such a thing could ever have been, or that, if it had existed as she described, the Urban Conservation Corps could have fashioned the ruins into what he knew today. And yet, the information he had laboriously accessed from the metamedium seemed to confirm her tales. (And what other marvelous facts could he have easily learned, if only he weren’t bound by his lowly position in the Net to such a limited interface with the metamedium?)

Shaking his head in mixed anger and wonder, Rafe turned down Fifth, heading toward Avenue C. Halfway down the block he came to one of the entrances to the enormous arcology that occupied the land bounded by Avenues D and C, and Fifth and Sixth Streets. (His own home building lacked a chop-shop, so he had been constrained to visit this portion of the Lower East Side labyrinth. Hoping the fresh air would clarify his thoughts, he had taken the surface streets, avoiding the underground slipstrata.)

At the entrance, one of the building’s security agents was on duty. The shimmery, translucent holo was that of a balding white man of middle age, wearing the uniform of a private security force.

Anywhere you saw an agent, an interface with the metamedium existed. Each interface consisted of at least three components: a holocaster, an audio input/output and a wide-angle video lens.

Rafe passed beneath the attentive gaze of the agent, whose head swivelled with utter realism to track his movements. The agent’s initial expression of boredom switched to one of alert interest. Rafe wondered if the agent’s overseer was actively monitoring, or if the agent was autonomous. There was no way to tell; not even engaging the agent in conversation would offer any clue.

After all, what was an agent—even in autonomous mode —if not an utterly faithful representation of its overseer?

Rafe, repressing a sigh of envy, headed for his bloody appointment.

At the chop-shop on one of the higher floors, Rafe had not even the leisure of waiting behind other patients. The waiting room was empty, and the pretty female agent on duty behind the desk, after having him enter his authorization code on the contract, told him to go right into the doctor’s office.

Rafe kept repeating under his breath, “Twenty thousand dollars, twenty thousand dollars…”

The doctor’s agent stood beside the complex bank of automated surgical equipment that nearly filled the room. Rafe imagined he could smell spilled blood in the spotless, sterile room, and his skin crawled. He stared at his distorted reflection in a curved, polished surface, seeing a sweat-slicked brown face, with a sparse mustache he suddenly wished he could shave off, so ridiculous did it now appear.

“Good morning, Mister Miraflores,” the agent said. “Are there any questions you’d care to ask before the operation?”

Rafe shook his head no, swallowing some unknown bolus that had mysteriously appeared in his dry throat.

“In that case, if you’ll disrobe, and lie down.…”

The agent indicated the surface beneath the hovering instruments with a gracious gesture.

Shivering, Rafe undressed and climbed onto the soft warm pallet.

The agent rested his holographic hand on an arm of the machinery that ended in the cone of a face mask. The mask descended, the agent’s insubstantial flesh appearing to guide it. Rafe knew that the machinery was being directed by the agent via the metamedium, and that the equipment would perform the same whether the holo was present or not. But the illusion was so complete, that it appeared as if a living doctor were lowering the mask to his face. Rafe felt an unexpected confidence that he was in good hands, and that everything would turn out all right after all. With this payment, he was only one step away from overseeing his own agent, from having free run of the whole metamedium.…

Gas began to hiss out of the mask clamped to his face, and Rafe’s consciousness dispersed into wispy shreds.

The last thing he recalled thinking was:

What the hell did a guy with cojones need two real lungs for anyway?

2.

Revisionism

The Three Laws Governing Agents are encoded in a software nucleus that forms the innermost layer of every agent. Upon each contact by the agent with the metamedium, validation routines check for the unaltered presence of this nucleus. Any anomalies detected by the metamedium supervisor will result in the instant destruction of the agent in question, and a total ban on any future contact with the metamedium on the part of its registered overseer. Note also that during logon to the metamedium, a check is made to insure that the registered overseer is not already sponsoring an agent, insuring that no overseer will run more than a single agent…

The Three Laws are rendered in English as follows (for a symbolic representation of the relevant code and its parsing, see Gov. Pub. #16932A45.1):

1. An agent will obey only its single registered overseer.

2. An agent cannot lie to its overseer.

3. An agent’s autonomy is limited to the exact extent dictated by its overseer.

—Extract from Gov. Pub. #20375X28.0

3.

The Way to the English Gardens

Expertly placing a new coaster first, the waitress set down the frosted half-liter stein of beer before the mild-faced young man wearing round wire-rim glasses. She eyed the growing stack of cardboard squares and circles, each bearing the logo of a German beer in smeary colors, piled haphazardly on the scarred wooden table. After a moment’s hesitation, she evidently decided not to enquire as to what had caused such a change in the drinking habits of one of her more sober regular customers.

It was just as well the waitress controlled her curiosity, for Reinhold Freundlich would not have answered her with anything other than a smug smile.

After she departed, Freundlich raised his mug in a toast to the stuffed deer head high on the wall of the Augustiner
Bierkeller.
Bringing the rim to his lips, he tilted his head back, gaining a fine view of the dim rafters of the dark room, and drained off half the cold, frothy beer. A sudden dizziness swept over him, and he nearly tipped over in his chair. Lowering the stein uncertainly, he considered calling this his last glass. No sense in making himself sick with celebration.

Besides, he wanted to retain enough rationality to ponder the myriad possibilities of what he had accomplished. It was not every day, after all, that one achieved the impossible.

And the complete subversion of every agent in the metamedium certainly ranked as “impossible.”

Laughing softly to himself, Freundlich finished his beer, rose unsteadily and tossed several coins on the table. He walked a wavering path to the door, nodding with an overly solicitous air to the waitress, and exited onto Kaufingerstrasse, where the bright sun caused him to blink. He wondered where to head next. His dreary rooms behind the train station, full of the common appointments of an impecunious student, hardly seemed the proper surroundings for the grand ideas and schemes that thronged his mind. The important thinking he had to do definitely required a commensurate setting. Ah, the vast, manicured expanses of the English Gardens, with their sinuous gravel paths and burbling streams, seemed just the place.