"Kiln People" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

22 Mime’s the Word

This is my first chance to recite a report since I barely escaped that mess at Universal Kilns.

Talking into an old-fashioned autoscribe feels like a poor use of precious time, especially when I’m on the run. How much more convenient it is for Albert’s special-model ditective grays — outfitted with fancy subvocal recorders and built-in compulsions to describe everything they see or think, in realtime present tense! But I’m just a utility green, even after getting several dye jobs. A cheap knockoff. If there’s to be an account of my miserable part in all this, I must do it the hard way.

Which brings up the prize question. An account for whom?

Not for realAlbert, my maker, who is surely dead. Or the cops, who would as soon dissect me as look at me. As for my gray brothers. Hell, it creeps me out just thinking about them.

So why bother reciting at all? Who will care?

I may be a frankie, but I can’t stop picturing Clara, away fighting her war in the desert, unaware that her real lover has been fried by a missile. She deserves the modern consolation — to hear about it from his ghost. That means me, since I’m the only ditto left. Even though I don’t really feel like Albert Morris at all.

So here it is, dear Clara. A ghost-written letter to help you get past the first stage of grief. Poor Albert had his faults, but at least he cared. And he had a job.

I was there when it happened — the “attack” on Universal Kilns, I mean. Standing on the factory floor not thirty yards away, staring in wonder as gray number two ran by, all blotchy and discolored from something horrid that was roiling his guts, preparing to burst. He sped on past, barely glancing at me, or at Pal’s little ferret-ditto on my shoulder, though we had just gone through Hades to sneak inside and rescue him!

Ignoring our shouts, he searched frantically, then found what he was looking for — a place to die without hurting anybody.

Well, anybody except that poor forklift driver, who never understood why a stranger suddenly wanted to burrow up his gloaca. And that was just the fellow’s first rude surprise. The giant ditworker let out a bellow, then began expanding to several times his former size, like a distended balloon … like some cartoon character blowing too hard on his own thumb. I thought the unlucky forklift was about to explode! Then we’d all be finished. Me for sure. Everyone in the factory. Universal Kilns. Maybe every ditto in the city?

(Imagine all the archies having to do everything for themselves! They’d know how, of course. But everyone is so used to being many — living several lives in parallel. Being limited to just one at a time would drive folks nuts.)

Lucky for us, the hapless forklift stopped expanding at the last moment. Like a surprised blowfish, he stared about with goggle eyes, as if thinking, This was never in my contract. Then the soul-glow extinguished. The clay body shuddered, hardened, and went still.

Man, what a way to go.

There followed a maelstrom of chaos and clamoring alarms. Production machinery shut down. Worker-golems dropped every routine task and the vast factory thronged with emergency teams, converging to contain the damage. I saw displays of reckless courage — or it would have been courage if the crews weren’t expendable duplicates. Even so, it took valor to approach the bloated carcass. Faint sprays jetted from the leaking, distended body. Any ditto who brushed even a droplet fell in writhing agony.

But most of the poison was checked, held inside the massive, quivering forklift. As it started to slump and dissolve from within, purple-striped cleaners arrived with long hoses, spraying the area with anti-prion foam.

Company officials followed. No real humans yet, but lots of busy scientific grays in white coats, then some bright blue policedits and a silver-gold Public Safety proctor. Finally, a platinum duplicate of the UK chief himself, Vic Aeneas Kaolin, strode upon the scene demanding answers.

“Come on,” Pallie’s little ferret-self said from my shoulder. “Let’s scram. You’re orange right now, but the big guy still may recognize your face.”

Despite that, I was tempted to stay and find out what just happened. Maybe help clear Albert’s name. Anyway, what awaited me out there in the world? Ten hours of futile head-scratching, listening to the whining recriminations of Gadarene and Lum till my clock ran out and it was my own turn to melt away?

The foam still flowed, bubbling, hissing, and spreading across the factory floor. Imprinted survival instincts feel like the real thing, and I joined other onlookers backing away from the stuff. “All right,” I sighed at last. “Let’s get out of here.”

I turned — only to face several burly security types, liveried in pale orange with blue bands. And triple-size ersatz muscles that they flexed menacingly.

“Please come with us,” one of them said with an augmented voice of authority, taking my arm in an adamant lock grip. Which I immediately took to be a good sign.

The “please” part, that is.

We were put inside a sealed van — one with plain metal sides that stayed opaque, no matter how hard we stared, which Palloid thought rather rude.

“They could at least give us a view before they start dicing up our brains,” groused the ferret with Pal’s face, ingratiating himself with the guards in his typical fashion. “Hey, up front! How about letting a fellow consult with his lawyer-program, eh? You want to be held personally liable when I slap a mega-lien on your whole company for ditnapping? Are you aware of the recent ruling in ditAddison vs. Hughes? It’s no longer an excuse for a golem to say he was ‘just following orders.’ Remember the Henchman Law. If you switch sides right now, you can help me sue your boss and go swimming in cash!”

Good old Pal, a charmer in whatever form he takes. Not that it mattered. Whether we were “under arrest” in a strictly legal sense was immaterial. As mere property — and possible participants in industrial sabotage — we weren’t going to inspire any UK employees to turn whistle-blower over our abused rights.

At least the driver left my armrest entertainment-flasher turned on, so I asked for news. The space in front of me ballooned with holonet bubbles, most of them dealing with a “failed fanatical terrorist attack” at UK. They weren’t very informative. Anyway, a short while later another item grabbed top billing as a banner globe erupted, crowding other holos aside.

At first I didn’t recognize the site of the blazing inferno. But news correlators soon added the address targeted by a clandestine murder rocket.

“Cripes,” Pallie muttered near my ear. “That’s tough, Albert.”

It was home. Or the place where this body of mine got imprinted with memories, before getting set loose into a long, regrettable day. Damn, they even burned the garden, I thought, watching flames consume the structure and everything inside.

In one sense, it seemed a mercy. Leading rumor-nets had already begun naming Albert Morris as a chief suspect in the UK attack. He’d be in a real jam if he still lived. Poor guy. It was predictable, I guess, so long as he kept trying to act as a romantic, old-fashioned crusader against evil. Sooner or later he was going to irritate someone much bigger and stronger and get in real trouble. Whoever did all this was being devastatingly thorough.

Trouble didn’t even begin to cover what I was in as the van pulled to a stop. The rear door started opening and Pal’s raggedy little ferretdit prepared to spring. But the guards were vigilant and quick. One snatched Palloid’s neck in a viselike grip. The other took me by an elbow, gently but with enough power to show how futile resistance would be.

We stepped out next to the unlit side portico of a big stone mansion, turning down a dim set of stairs partly hidden behind some truly outstanding chrysanthemums. I might have resisted the guard long enough to try and sniff the flowers, if I had a working nose. Ah well.

At the bottom, an open door led into a sort of lounge where half a dozen figures relaxed at tables and chairs, smoking, talking, and quaffing beverages. At first glance I thought they were real, since all wore varied shades of human-brown under durable cloth garments in rather old-fashioned styles. But an expert glance showed their fleshtones to be dye jobs. Their faces really gave them away — bearing familiar expressions of resigned ennui. These were dittos at the end of a long work day, waiting patiently to expire.

Two of them sat before expensive interface screens, talking to computer-generated AI avatars with faces similar to their own. One was a small, childlike golem, wearing scuffed denim. I couldn’t catch any of his words. But the other one, fashioned after a buxom woman with reddish hair, wearing ill-fitting matronly garb, spoke loudly enough to overhear as the guard pulled me along.

“… with the divorce coming up, there are going to be a lot of changes,” she told the onscreen face. “My part will get more complicated while stress-induced submotivations grow increasingly subtle. If we can’t have better day-to-day continuity, I wish we could at least be given better data on the original misery indices. Especially since I have to start each day almost from scratch. Fortunately, the situation was so chaotic that consistency isn’t much required, or even expected by the subject …”

Her voice was pure professionalism, the words unrelated to any concern of mine. Albert Morris clearly wasn’t the only skilled contract laborer hired for obscure projects by an eccentric trillionaire.

Our burly escorts took us to a door beyond the lounge/waiting room. A visible ray scanned their blue-striped foreheads and opened the portal, revealing a huge chamber divided by rows of heavy pillars to support the mansion overhead. We strode quickly through this concrete forest, glimpsing various laboratories on all sides. To my left, the equipment had to do with dittoing, as you’d expect — freezers, imprinting units, kilns, and such, plus a few I didn’t recognize. To my right lay the kind of gear involved in human biology and medicine — almost a miniature real people hospital, augmented with the latest brain scanner/analyzers.

That is, I guessed they were the latest. Albert is — or was — an interested amateur who studiously read articles about the brain psychopathology of evildoers. A fascination that I, as a frankie, do not seem to share.

The guards escorted us to another waiting area, outside a sealed doorway. Through a narrow window I glimpsed an individual pacing nervously, barking sharp questions at somebody out of sight. The interrogator’s skin was burnished-bright and expensive synthetic tendons bunched, almost like a man’s. Few could afford bodies like that one, let alone to use them in bulk quantities. It was the second high-class Kaolin-ditto I had seen in an hour. He kept glancing at a nearby wall where multiple bubble displays floated and jostled, ballooning outward in reaction to his gaze, showing events in many time zones.

I noticed that the UK factory was prominent in several bubbles, revealing that emergency teams still moved about, but with less frantic urgency than before, having apparently succeeded at limiting the prion attack. I’d wager that production might resume before dawn, in remote sections of the factory.

Another bubbleview gazed down on the smoldering ruins of a small house — Albert’s home, and probably his crematorium. Alas.

“Come away from there, please,” said one of my escorts, in a mild tone that implied a second warning would be less courteous. I left the window and joined Palloid, who lay on the slim mattress of a nearby hospital gurney. Pal’s little ferret-golem was licking some wounds it received during our brief battle gaining entrance to Universal Kilns.

As realPal expected, the tunnels laboriously dug by fanatic protestor groups — both Lum’s and Gadarene’s — had already been discovered by someone. Hidden mechanical guardians, vigilant and much longer lasting than clay, pounced when we came through. But clay is versatile. And those robo-wardens never faced a squadron of attacking mini-Pals! By the time I followed close behind, the battle was mostly over. I found one Palloid standing amid shards of its ditto-comrades and melted fragments of the mechanical guards. His refractive fur smoldered and most of the tiny combat beetles it had carried were gone. But enemy sentinels were gone and our path stood clear for a dash into the factory proper, searching for my gray brother, before he was duped into committing a crime.

As it turned out, our warning came too late. Still, the gray must have realized something independently. His last-minute dive into the foul belly of a forklift was courageous and resourceful. At least, I hoped the authorities would see it that way. If they were shown the whole story.

Waiting in the underground anteroom, Pal’s little golem soon piped up with a complaint.

“Hey! What does it take to get some meditcal attention around here? Anybody notice I’m damaged? How about a pretty nurse? Or a can of spackle and a putty knife?”

One guard stared at him, then muttered into a wrist mike. Soon an orange utility rox showed up, devoid of any features to show the sex of its original, and started applying varied sprays to Palloid’s wounds. I, too, had suffered a burn or two skirmishing near the tunnels, but did you see me whining?

Minutes passed. A lot of them. I realized it must be Wednesday already. Great. Maybe I should have spent yesterday at the beach, after all.

While we waited, a messenger-dit came hurrying downstairs from the mansion proper, jogging on long legs, bearing a small Teflon container. Palloid wrinkled his wet nose, sneezing in distaste. “Whatever he’s got in that box, it’s been disinfected about fifty different ways,” he commented. “Smells like a mix of alcohol, benzene, bacteena, and that foam stuff they were using back at UK.”

The messenger knocked, then entered. I heard platinum Kaolin grind out, “Finally!” — before we were left again to cool our heels, decaying with each passing minute. No sooner did the repair nurse finish patching Palloid than my little friend chirped again, demanding another favor.

“Hey, chum, how’s about giving me a reader, eh? Gotta stay productive, right? My rig recently joined a book club. He wants to catch up on Moby-Dit for their next meeting. I might as well cover some chapters while we’re sitting around.”

The nerve of the guy! Suppose he actually got to read a few pages. Did he actually expect to inload anything to realPal? Yeah sure, I thought. As if you and I are ever leaving this place.

To my surprise, the guard shrugged and went to a cabinet, pulled out a battered net-plaque, and tossed it onto the gurney near Palloid. Soon the little golem was pawing his way through an online fiction index, searching for the latest best-seller about a seagoing golem so huge that its energy cells would take decades to run down … a monsterdit imprinted with the tormented soul of a half-crazed savant who must then chase his dire creation as it runs amuck across the seven seas, smashing ships and denouncing its adamant pursuer for about a thousand pages. There’s been a rash of stories and films like that lately, featuring dittos in conflict with their archetype originals. I hear this one’s well written and full of arty existential angst. But Albert Morris never had a taste for high literature.

In fact, I was kind of surprised to learn that Pal had a weakness for that stuff. A book club, my ceramic ass! He was up to something.

“Come,” one of our guards said, answering some hidden signal. “You’re wanted now.”

“And it’s such an honor to be wanted,” Pal quipped, always ready with a feel-good remark. Dropping the plaque, he scampered to my shoulder and I strode through the now-open door of the conference room.

A solemn Kaolin-golem awaited us. “Sit,” he commanded. I plopped into the chair he indicated — more plush than anything needed by my inexpensive tush. “I am very busy,” the magnate’s duplicate enounced. “I’ll give you ten minutes to explain yourselves. Be exact.”

No threats or inducements. No warnings not to lie. Sophisticated neural-net programs would be listening, almost certainly. Although such systems aren’t intelligent (in any strict sense of the word), it takes concentration and luck to fool them. Albert had the skill, and I suppose that means I do, too. But sitting there, I lacked the inclination to try.

Anyway, the truth was entertaining enough. Pallie barged right in.

“I guess you could say it started on Monday, when two different groups of fanatics came to me, complaining that my friend here” — a ferret-paw waved at me — “was harassing them with late night visits …”

He proceeded to jabber the whole story, including our suspicion that someone was contriving to frame the hapless fanatics — Lum and Gadarene — along with realAlbert, setting them all up to take the blame for this evening’s sabotage at UK.

I couldn’t fault Palloid’s decision to cooperate and tell everything. The sooner investigators were steered onto the right track, the better — one way to clear Albert’s name, for whatever good that would do him. (I noticed that the little ferret artfully avoided naming his own rig. realPal was safe, for now.)

And yet, my clay brain roiled with misgivings. Kaolin himself wasn’t above suspicion. Sure, I couldn’t imagine why a trillionaire might sabotage his own company. But all sorts of twisty conspiracies can look plausible after a day like the one I just had. Wasn’t it right here, at Kaolin Manor, that Tuesday’s gray number one mysteriously vanished? Anyway, Kaolin was one of the few who possessed the means — both technical and financial — to pull off something so ornate and diabolical.

Foremost in my mind was this: Why aren’t any cops present? This questioning should be handled by professionals.

It implied that Kaolin had something to hide. Even at risk of thwarting the law.

He could be in real trouble for this, I thought, if even a single real person was harmed by tonight’s attack. True, the only people I saw getting damaged at UK were dittos … The thought hung there, unfinished and unsatisfying.

“Well, well,” our platinum host said after Pal’s ferret-dit finished its amazing recital about late night visitors, religious fanatics, civil rights nuts, and secret tunnels. The Vic shook his head. “That’s quite a tale.”

“Thanks!” Palloid panted, wagging his rearmost appendage at the compliment. I almost hit him.

“I would normally find your story preposterous, of course. A tissue of blatant fantasies and obvious distractions.” He paused. “On the other hand, it corresponds with additional information I received, a short time ago.”

He motioned for the messenger, who had been standing patiently in a corner, to come forward. The yellow golem used disposable gloves to reach into his box and remove a tiny cylinder — the smallest and simplest kind of unpowered audio archive — slipping it into a playback unit on Kaolin’s conference table. The sound that emerged wasn’t one that our grandparents would have called a voice — more like an undulating murmur of grunted clicks and half-tones. That turned into a warbling whine as the messenger dialed the playback unit to higher speed. And yet, I knew this language well. Every word came across perfectly clear.

I always hate getting up off the warming tray, grabbing paper garments from a rack … knowing I’m the copy-for-a-day …

Ugh. What got me in this mood? Maybe Ritu’s news about her father. A reminder that real death still lurks for all.

… Some days you’re a grasshopper. Some the ant.

Recognition went beyond hearing familiar rhythms and phrases. No, the very thoughts themselves struck me with a haunting sense of repetition. The person who had subvocalized this record began his parody of life just minutes before I started mine. Each of us commenced existence Tuesday morning thinking along similar lines, though I wasn’t equipped with a gray’s fancy features. Made of coarser stuff, I rapidly diverged across some strange boundary and soon realized I was a frankie. The first one Albert Morris ever made.

The fellow who recorded this diary was evidently more conventional. Another loyal Albert gray. Dedicated. A real pro. Clever enough to pierce the schemes of your regular, garden-variety evildoer.

But also predictable enough so that some truly devious mind could lay a fiendish trap.

… I’m in Studio Neo, passing classy establishments, offering services no one imagined before kiln tech appeared …

Wait a sec.

It’s the phone … Pal … Nell decides to pass the call on to my real self, but I listen in. He wants me to come over …

“See?” the little ferret-golem on my shoulder jeered. “I tried to warn you, Albert!”

“I keep telling you, I’m not Albert.” I grated.

We were both caught up in nervous irritation, listening to the super-rapid playback describe a fateful rendezvous.

Maestra’s executive assistant … She beckons me away from Wammaker’s.

“Our meeting concerns sensitive topics …”

We listened raptly as the “clients” — one claiming to be the maestra herself — explained their need for an untraceable investigator to nose around UK in a surreptitious yet legal manner, seeking clues to sequestered technologies. Just the sort of thing to tease Albert’s vanity and curiosity! I found it especially artful how each of his new employers made certain to act irritating or unpleasant in different ways. Knowing my archetype, he’d overcompensate, not letting dislike influence his decision. He’d persevere. Suffer the insufferable out of sheer obstinacy. (Call it “professionalism.”)

They were playing him like a fish.

Soon after came his adventure in the Rainbow Lounge, barely surviving a coincidental encounter with some golem-gladiators. An encounter that left him needing urgent repairs — conveniently provided by the drones of Queen Irene’s hive. The gray’s present-tense recitation made you want to stand and shout at the warbling voice, demanding that he wake up and notice how he was being used!

Well, in hindsight it’s easy to recognize a diabolical trick. (Would I have seen it under the same circumstances?)

But all sides made mistakes. The enemy — whoever pulled this convoluted caper — failed to notice gray Albert’s hidden realtime recorder, tucked amid the nest of high-density soulfibers in his larynx. Not even when they had him laid out, unconscious, using the pretext of “repairs” to install a vicious prion bomb. No doubt they checked for more sophisticated communication and tracking devices, but the tiny archiver used no power source, just tiny throat-flexings to scratch audio at minuscule bit rates. An old-fashioned but virtually undetectable record-keeping system … which is why Albert always installed it in his grays.

No wonder Kaolin’s messenger took such precautions against touching the tiny spool! Though disinfected, it had been recovered from a yucky, prion-poisoned slurry on the UK factory floor — the merged remnants of a hapless forklift and a doomed private ditective. The archive might still hold a few catalytic molecules lethal to beings like us, who lack true immune systems.

Still, it was one useful clue, sparkling amid the melted remains. Vital evidence. Perhaps enough to vindicate my late maker.

So why was Kaolin playing it back for us — for Palloid and me — instead of the police?

The high-pitched account soon took us to the best part of the gray’s day — skillfully evading the Omnipresent Urban Eye, fooling the legion of public and private cameras covering nearly every angle of the modern civic landscape. He’d have enjoyed that. But then, having obscured his path, he entered Universal Kilns.

Two items spit forth, a visitor’s badge and a map … I head for the down escalator … dropping into a huge anthill beneath the corporate domes, looking for signs that Kaolin is illegally withholding scientific breakthroughs …

All right, suppose UK solved how to transmit the Standing Wave across distances greater than a meter. Will there be clues a layman might recognize? … Might UK executives already “beam” themselves all over the planet?

Palloid and I shared a glance. “Wow,” the little golem muttered.

Could that be the breakthrough? Remote dittoing would shake up a way of life we’ve at last started getting used to, after all these rocky years.

We both turned to stare at ditKaolin. His reaction gave nothing away, but what about the first time he heard those words, just minutes ago? Did that platinum complexion flush with anger and dismay?

A vibration below … giant machines mix organic clay, threading it with fibers tuned to vibrate rhythms of a plucked soul … molding dolls that walk and talk … and we take it all for granted …

Damn. Something’s bugging me. Think … how could Universal Kilns conceal anything huge and ground-breaking?

Yes, evil thrives on secrecy. It’s what drives Albert on. Expose villainy. Find truth. But is that what I’m doing now?

“Finally,” I muttered, as the gray started asking the right questions. In fairness, he did express doubts earlier. But that made the transcription even more frustrating, listening as he forged ahead, despite all misgivings.

Maybe the gray was defective, like me — a poor-quality copy made by an exhausted original. Not Albert at his best. On the other hand, he had been manipulated by experts. Maybe we never had a chance.

Some kind of gnat dodges a swat, darting toward my face. I use a surge-energy burst to grab … crumpling it in my hand.

The mini-Pal dug his claws into my pseudoflesh.

“Dammit, Albert. I spent good money on them tiny drones.” He glared those ferret eyes, as if the gray’s obstinacy were somehow my fault. I might have reacted, sweeping him off my shoulder. But the recording was approaching its deadly climax.

It makes sense … They’d maximize damage by delaying ignition … either with a timer or by setting it to go off when I pass a second security scan …

“Stop!” I cry -

From that point, the recitation turned into a rapid, jerky groan, much harder to make out, like words grunted by a hurried runner, or someone trying to concentrate on a desperate task.

Trying to save a lot more than his own measly life.

I spy a version of myself bearing a weasel-golem … Looks like today’s green found something better to do than clean toilets. Good for you, Green …

That made me feel a bit ashamed, for sardonic things I thought about this gray. Could I have tried harder to save him? Might realAl be alive now, if we succeeded?

Regret seemed pointless, with my own clock rapidly ticking out. Why was Kaolin playing this tape for us? To taunt our failure?

The poor forklift writhes … can’t blame him, but it drives me deeper, holding my breath … being consumed …

Am I deep enough? Will the huge clay body contain -

The recital ended in a harsh squeal.

Palloid and I turned once again to watch the stolid, almost-human features of ditAeneas Kaolin, who regarded us for a long time while one of his hands trembled slightly. Finally, he spoke in a low voice that sounded more fatigued than a middle-aged golem ought to feel.

“So. Would you two like a chance to find the perverts who did all this?”

Pal’s ditto and I shared a stare of blank surprise.

“You mean,” I asked. “You mean you want to hire us?”

What, exactly, did Kaolin expect us to accomplish in the ten hours (or less) that we had left?