19
Beep-beep …
I awoke to a steady electronic pulse from somewhere in the darkness.
My first thought was that it was the phone on my desk. Then I remembered that I was not in my apartment but instead hiding out in an abandoned house on the south side.
It had taken me the better part of the afternoon to make my getaway from Clayton. I rode the Yellow Line as far south as I could, then got off the MetroLink at the Gravois Avenue station and hiked as far as I dared into this dangerous part of the city. The police seldom ventured this far south except in Russian APCs, and even ERA troopers were reluctant to patrol the edges of Dogtown save by helicopter; perhaps the dragnet wouldn’t extend into this combat-zone neighborhood not far from the Mississippi River.
I hadn’t encountered any heat either on the train or on foot during my long journey through the city, but I was exhausted by the time I had found the house. Even after my close brush with the ERA Apache earlier tonight, I had soon fallen back asleep on the couch, trusting the stray dog who had adopted me to wake me up again if the chopper returned. The mutt had curled up on the floor next to the couch; he raised his head now, his brown ears cocked forward in curiosity as he stared at the source of the noise.
Joker lay on the bare floor where I had left it after I had finished dictating my notes, its red LED flashing in time with the annunciator. The dog got up and padded across the empty living room to sniff at it, then he looked up at me:
Someone-or perhaps something-was trying to get my attention.
“I dunno what it is either, buddy,” I murmured. “Let me see what’s going on.”
Drawn by the blinking diode, I swung my stiff legs off the couch and shuffled across the room to where the FT lay. Kneeling on the hardwood floor, I picked up Joker and opened its cover, expecting to find another mysterious IM displayed on its screen.
What I saw instead was a ghost: the face of my dead son, stolen from the video I had made of him a little over a year ago, now outlined in tiny animated pixels. Across the bottom of the screen was a message bar.
›Gerry Rosen, I need to talk to you.‹
›Daddy, I need to talk to you.‹
›Please talk to me, Gerry.‹
“No!” I yelled. “Leave me alone!”
I raised the PT over my head, about to hurl it across the room. Frightened by my surge of anger, the dog danced backward, whining a little as its tail crept down between its hindquarters. If nothing else, the dog’s reaction helped check my impulse; instead of dashing Joker against the wall, I lowered the PT and stabbed its vox button with my forefinger.
“Listen, you shit,” I snarled, “you’ve done enough to me already! Leave Jamie out of this!”
Jamie’s face didn’t vanish from the screen. Instead, the image blinked at me, somehow managing to assay a childish pout. God, it was scary; computer generated or not, it looked exactly like my kid.
Jamie’s voice emerged from Joker’s speaker.
“God, yes!” I yelled at the screen. “Don’t you understand? This is my son you’re using! He’s dead! Don’t you realize what this does to me?”
Jamie’s face assumed a confused expression.
“You think I don’t know that already?” I sagged to the floor, clutching Joker in my hands. “Why are you telling me this?”
“No, I’m not suffering from survivor’s syndrome, and I didn’t forget.” I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. “And lemme tell you something that isn’t a matter of public record … Jamie was on the train because I didn’t want to drive over to Illinois and pick him up after he went to see the steel mill. I was busy trying to write a book, so I bought him a train ticket instead, and if I hadn’t done that he might still be alive.”
“You’re goddamn right it’s a strong probability!” I snapped, my anger surging out of me. “So get him off the screen, you son of a bitch, and stop torturing me!”
Jamie evaporated from the screen; pixel by pixel, starting from the top of his head and moving downward past his brow, eyes, nose, mouth, and chin, my son’s features disappeared, leaving behind an androgynous, stylized face devoid of any distinguishing characteristics.
I took a deep breath, letting it out as a soft, shuddering rattle. “Yes, it is,” I said, “but can we switch to readout instead? It would … it would be easier on me if you did.”
The face remained, but the dialogue bar reappeared at the bottom of the screen: ›Are you more comfortable this way?‹
“Yeah, thanks.” I thought about it for a moment. “Why did you take Jamie’s face in the first place?”
›When I attempted to contact you earlier [Wednesday, April 17, 7:59 P.M.] I used the e-mail function in this node [i.e. Joker]. That attempt confused you, resulting in miscommunication between you and Beryl Hinckley. I was therefore forced to appropriate a medium that could not be confused with either a living person or a computer-simulated persona. I searched all available records and found your son. Do you understand now?‹
“More or less, yeah.” I propped my back against the wall, crossing my legs before me and placing Joker on my ankles. The dog yawned and lay down on its belly nearby. “So … is this Joker I’m talking to, or Ruby Fulcrum?”
›Joker is a node of the intelligent a-life-form you know as Ruby Fulcrum. All the functions that Joker is capable of performing, I can perform as well. Clarification: you are speaking to both Joker and Ruby Fulcrum. Do you understand?‹
It dawned on me that this was a little like asking a cell at the tip of my left pinkie whether its name was Bart or Gerry Rosen. Remember how it was when you were a kid and you first came to grips with the notion that the universe was infinite, that outer space just kept going and going and going, star after star, galaxy after galaxy, a deep and everlasting black vastness stretching forever, until using terms like light-years and parsecs became as meaningless as trying to describe the breadth of the continents or the depth of the oceans in values like millimeters or inches? The idea was so staggering that your mind automatically pushed it aside: such enormity is nearly impossible to contemplate on the human scale, and trying to do so without the abstractions of higher mathematics is an invitation to madness.
This was Ruby Fulcrum. The phase transition Hinckley had told me about had been achieved. I was no longer talking to Joker but instead to a tiny fraction of a vast cybernetic entity spread across hundreds of thousands of machines, from little Toshiba palmtops to Apple desktop terminals to IBM office mainframes to great Cray supercomputers, all interfaced by a digital/neural-net hybrid architecture as intricate as the hundreds of miles of veins and capillaries in a single human body.
Say howdy to God, Gerry Rosen. Or someone just like Him.
