programmed his system to use when a message was urgent. He went over to the worktable, touched one of the e-mails. The air lit with its transmission information and source. TAAJ GREEN-Nice to hear from her, but it could wait. He touched another of the little spheres floating there, and it lit from within with a blue glow. Next to it a man appeared, saying, 'Tired of fast food? Looking for something better in regional cuisine? Come to Georgetown's newest-'
Charlie grimaced, grabbed the spammy little mail-sphere out of the air, dropped it on the floor, and stepped on it. It vanished with a satisfying crunch, and the man vanished as well, making a digitally strangled noise.
He sighed, looked around him. 'Nick?' Charlie said.
'Making that connection for you now,' Charlie's system said. 'Access is open.'
'All right-' He went over to the doorway that he used for access, and stuck his head through. But on the other side was nothing but the plain glowing whiteness he had seen before. There, sitting in the midst of it, was the Eames chair, and some mail-solids spinning unanswered in the air, but no sign of Nick.
He went back into his own space and said to his workspace, 'Conditional instruction.'
'Ready,' the workspace maintenance program said. 'State the conditions.'
'If Nick Melchior calls, e-mails, or shouts for me,' Charlie said, 'call the house comms number until 2300 hours. Implement immediately.'
'Conditional instruction saved. Implementing now.' 'Thanks.' Charlie closed his eyes and told his link through the
implant to undo itself. With that slight shiver, he was back in afternoon light, in the den again.
With a frown, Charlie went downstairs, sat down at the table, and once more started making notes on the scratch-pad. Soon he'd filled a page, and then another. He was more worried about Nick than he had been on the way home. Afternoon was shading toward dusk when he looked up again at a sound from down the hall.
'Charlie?'
'Down here, Mom,' he said, looking with surprise at the pages of notes. His mom-small and dark and petite in her 'formal' whites, which she didn't normally wear at work when doing psych-came strolling in, dropped some textbooks and her computer/workpad on the table, and draped her pink sweater over the chair at the table's other end. 'You have anything to eat, sweetheart?' she said.
'Uh, yeah.'
She opened the fridge and rooted around for a moment, coming up with a jug of iced tea. 'I wish,' his mother said, sloshing it thoughtfully, 'that someone would explain to me why this always goes cloudy in here.'
He thought about that. 'Microparticulate matter?' Charlie said. 'Tea's not really an infusion when you make it out of tea bags. It's a suspension. The characteristics of the suspension change when you chill it.'
His mom shut the fridge and went to the cupboard for a glass, then came back to get some ice out of the freezer. 'Sounds good to me.'
'It's a theory,' Charlie said. 'I'll ask my physics teacher tomorrow.'
'Why? Sounds like you're on the right track.' She sat down at the table on his right, glancing idly at the newspaper.
As she did, her eye fell on the headline about the two suicides. Charlie saw her look, and he sighed and pushed away the notes he was making. 'Mom-' He glanced up, trying to find a way to begin to explain it all to her.
'Charlie,' she said, 'what is it? You look like you've lost your best friend.'
'Uh, not quite.' And he found himself wondering whether the phrase, as she was using it, was intended simply as a cliche. It could be a slightly unnerving experience, having a psychiatric nurse as a mother. Not that she could read your mind or anything-in fact, her normal disclaimer was 'I don't have to read minds. Faces are more than enough.' Maybe in my case, Charlie thought, it's more than usually true. She sees my face every day. 'Suicide-' Charlie said.
'Hmm,' she said. 'Are we coming at this as a general subject, or for a specific reason?'
He swallowed. 'I'm worried about somebody.' 'Who?'
Charlie shook his head. 'Uh, I want to be clear about my facts first. How do you tell for sure if someone's going to kill themselves?'
'For sure?' his mother said, raising her eyebrows as she sat down. 'You don't ever, for sure. I wish… Oh, there are various signs. Personality changes… changes in behavior, inability to concentrate or do business or schoolwork, for example… changes in the way someone sleeps or eats, feelings of worthlessness or hopelessness. Also, a lot of talk about suicide coming up suddenly can be significant. Or gestures like suddenly giving prized possessions away… ' She turned her glass around on the table. 'You have to look to see how many of these signs are there at once, how serious. they seem… and look hard to make sure that the person isn't doing these things for some other reason.'
Charlie sat back in his chair. 'Did you hear about these suicides in the Deathworld virtual environment?'
She raised her eyebrows. 'Matter of fact, I have. There was a mention of them in an article in one of the psychiatric journals last month.'
'Did the article say anything about what might have caused them?'
His mother thought for a moment. 'Nothing concrete,' she said. 'The authors talked briefly about the details of the people who had suicided, but the article didn't go into a lot of depth. Mostly it was investigating the possibility that this was an `artefactual suicide cluster,' a situation in which there are an unusually high number of suicides in a given area or set of circumstances, but none of the deaths exhibit any affiliation to the others any identifiable common cause. A statistical fluke, in other words.'
'You mean the article couldn't find any linkage among the suicides, except for the fact that they had all been in Deathworld.'
'That's right.' His mother shifted in her chair. 'But bear in mind, honey, that this was just a short article, and it was thin on detail.'
Charlie thought about that for a moment. 'Okay,' he said. 'Then tell me something else. Have you ever heard of someone committing suicide because of some kind of implanted suggestion?'
She looked thoughtfully at him for several seconds before replying. 'While such things can be done,' his mom said, 'they take a lot of doing. A whole lot. The human mind is committed to keeping itself going, at any cost, even under what looks like intolerable pressure to the outside world. Sometimes it copes by going crazy. Even though that may not seem like a particularly wonderful option to you or me, it satisfies the mind's basic need-to keep on going. It takes a considerable intervention, a very noticeable level of interference, to subvert a mind sufficiently to make it completely give up that commitment to survive.'
'Like they used to say that you couldn't be hypnotized into doing something you wouldn't normally do.'
'Nothing important, no.' His mother leaned back in the chair again. 'Let's put it this way. Your whole life is a series of conditioning experiences. Your early life, for example, is about teaching you how to behave in human society, everything from 'Thou shalt not put thy feet up on the furniture' to 'Thou shalt not kill.' ' Charlie hurriedly took his feet off the chair nearest to him. His mother smiled. 'And your training, the conditioning you get from your parents, your teachers, your friends, slowly slots everything more or less into 'order of importance' in your unconscious, your ID, whatever you want to call the part of your brain that reacts before you really have time to think about it. You learn, ideally, which instructions are really important and which ones aren't. So someone who hypnotized you might not have too much trouble getting you to put your feet up on a chair. On the scale of 'important,' that's pretty low. But if they tried to tell you to kill yourself?' She shook her head. 'You wouldn't do it. Not unless you had been conditioned all your life to believe your own survival wasn't particularly important… or unless you were deranged already.'
'What about subliminal stuff, then?'
She stretched. 'That has some effect, yes… but they've been arguing about it for a century now, and no one's sure how much. Again, the question has to be taken case by case. Some people are more susceptible to subliminals than others… and not necessarily people who are stressed or have psychiatric problems, either. Some environments are more conducive to the administration of subliminals than others, and suggestions which produce strong results in one format or medium will fail completely in another.' She shrugged. 'Use of subliminals in public communications is illegal, of course. Not to say there's not ongoing suspicion that they're occasionally used. But as for making someone kill themselves?' She shook her head. 'I very much doubt it.'
'What if someone found a new way to do it… more strongly, or in some way that couldn't be detected?'
