Growing up in Tier 3000, page 4
“Couldn’t the pilot just gun us down when we, uh, if we get within range?”
“He’s programmed to know our strength. I’d say no.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Get down there, wait for him to make his move, and teleport just before detonation.”
“That’s cutting it very damn close.”
“Theoretically, we could get off in a fraction of a second.”
“Just how obvious can we expect his move to be?”
“He’s got to be fairly open. He won’t know when we’re coming, or whether we know he is demolitionary or not …wait, let me try something.”
Carol falls softly prone, like a Marine boot at slow fire at 500 yards. She rests her chin on her hands, forming a bipod, and ellipses her binocs to maximum. Her view scans over the android face, the neuter-bland physiognomy, the slash of aminoplast lip-line, the faceted eyes, the quad orifices of the nasal prosthete. Auditory shells are visible under the ear-flaps. Carol struggles to get resolution of the picture, the greatly magnified yoke of fuses and plastic trinitrates focusing and refocusing in the periphery of her vision. “Shit, he’s going to have to light a match to himself to set that off—we might have guessed really that your putpars couldn’t swing a cool sure-thing demo contract. We’ll be safe enough to approach him and teleport, say, right back here, when the fuses go.”
The small forms begin a little slalom down the slopes, their levitators easing out the rough spots and the transport implants muffled down for braking. They ski onto the glacier and drift toward the plane. The android waves as if flagging down a train and the husky bounds out, bushy tail wagging. Jonas slides up to the polished wooden prop, with Carol bumping him gently from behind and closing her hand firmly around his life-support waistband. “Gee, mister, what a keen plane…”
Jonas feels like toying with the android. A pasty hand reaches up, almost in clumsy haste, to turn a knurled valve, and blue sparks fizzle across the android’s neck. Carol tightens her grip on Jonas and activates her teleport implant. In a delicious soaring moment, they are back on the mountain ledge. The android fumbles frantically with its thoracic energy cells, then is obliterated in a bright starburst of dusky orange light. One yellow wing whips up through the smoke and cartwheels slowly back down, bouncing and cracking on the ice. A blunted whooshing explosion rumbles up to the childrens’ ears.
“Scratch one android character actor, one 1930 model radial Fairchild, and a formfitting bomb,” Carol says vacantly.
“And the husky.” Jonas sounds sad.
“Getting the drift of the war we’re in?” Carol sounds masculine.
“Yeah. Say, was there ever a time when groups were cohesive because of positive bonds? You know, did people ever dig each other to the extent of showing routine cooperation?”
“No.”
“I somehow expected a more extended answer.”
“I can give you a long no or a short no.”
“Do you see conflict as adaptive?”
“Again, adaptive-aschmaptive. You fight the heat or leave the kitchen, and the latter amounts to wasting your chances. If you are a sick reindeer, you belong to the wolf. If you’re imperative about your territory—hey, I made a funny—you gut it out till your putative parents either move out or get zilched.”
“We are very much like animals, aren’t we?”
“Shit, we’re not nearly as good—good in the sense of orderly lives. We have grown intellectually arrogant and purport to deny instinct as somehow beneath our dignity. Try baring your little white neck to Jason or Ellen and you’ll get it slit. But the wolf, ah, the maligned, feared predator, pisses on the ground beside the bared neck of the loser, and shows some brand of instinctual compassion—hey, how did we get on this subject? We can intellectualize at the colloquia—let’s get off this scary perch and try to get the drop on the parental pair.
They probably think we’re zilched by the former Sergeant Android Preston.”
A provobot satellite arcs high overhead., An airsled drops from the gondola and sets trajectory for the smoking glacial crater. The children teleport to the scene and wave as the provobot sled hisses to a landing. The bot stands in Colossus of Rhodes stance, tapes Carol’s account of the incident, and takes trivid shots of the area. The robot is squat and nondescript and neutral in manner. He mounts a tiny cycle seat on the sled and motions for the children to get into the storage pod. The sled lifts off toward the hovering satellite.
Carol pinches Jonas playfully. “The provobots will see that we return to our region. They will probably take us right to our tower. Won’t Jason and Ellen be surprised?” Carol’s giggle spins into a snarl, like a young kitten mewing. “My own dear put-parents,” Jonas shakes his head and glints his eyes, “the twin sons of bitches, accidents of the night, fragments of copulatory caprice.” “Now you’re getting the idea, baby,” Carol says, “we’ll have to come up with a special way for them to get theirs…maybe something slow and ritualistic, like piranha souffle or carcinoma aerosol!—”
“How about doing a Cask of Amontillado bit, and leave some hydra eggs in the wall?” Jonas crows.
“Crazy,” Carol nods.
VI
Jason and Ellen sulk over the topological bridge slab. Jason’s sphere is teardrop-shaped and Ellen’s is gourdlike. “Henri had a beautiful fat spheroid last week,” Ellen moans, “we’ll never be good bridge players.” Jason tucks his knees up and hugs them tightly, rolling forward slowly in the forcefield. “Nobody is a good bridge player,” he sounds weary, “at least I never met or even heard of one.” They look at the robot dummy’s perfect sphere, the cumulative product of perfect intra-player vectors. “Smartass bridge bot,” Ellen cuts at the bland face. “Your pleasure, my lady,” the pleasing voice replies.
Outside, the territorial sensor atop the region’s scanning tower picks up two small teleportational blips. Reciprocal probes beam out and are countered by identification codes. The shimmering blue forcefield yields an opening and Jonas and Carol zip through in their silver cocoons. They awake in the sector station like saints in wall niches coming to life. They step from the amniotic shells, small mummies from pure molecular isomorph coffins.
Jonas glances around the station. Two charbots are sweeping the deck with wand-like devices. A large trivid deck is alive with horses charging across frozen Crimean marshes, a small circle of waiting passengers watching in kinesthetic empathy. A noisy familial group emerges from niches across the room and gets noisier when one of the children jabs the putfat with a cane. The rail-thin motput slaps the child with a modstun. bolt and drapes him over her hard shoulder. Pure tone symmetric music flows through the transducts, soothing, pacific dia-tonics.
Jonas and Carol walk toward the egress vesicle. “Let’s walk awhile first,” Jonas suggests. They flux oxygen packets into their nostrils and emerge from the station onto the mall. A sea of plasticrete stretches out to the glowing terracar trenches. Pedwalks radiate from a central sonic fountain and the air hisses with several aviettes and delivery drones. The suns set fretfully behind a ridge of geodecks, spattering the sky with undulating murky red pseudopods. The children step onto a pedwalk and hunk over in fluid postures. Far ahead, a dowager clone tries to pace her rearing Dalmations, and aft of the children are a group of adolescent copulators on horizontal bars. They admix playful intromissive postures with advanced gymnastic tricks. The pedwalk rolls past a ring of tropical parks and Carol and Jonas step off. They sit on the spongy matting of creeper grasses and look at each other for several seconds.
“I hope this little outing has extinguished your sentimentality,” Carol says, her voice yet unsure. “It’s more of a shock to some kids than to others, but we have to come to grips with the facts. We have to kill off our putpars. Whatever emotional dependence you felt for them should be waning by now. You probably know this, but I’ll say it anyway; you’re in a developmental stage in which plateaus and curves, nadirs and asymptotes flow at high rates. One week, you may love the balloon warmth of a maternal breast, and the very next, want to shred it with a razor. You can enjoy paternal piggyback rides heartily, and a few weeks later, you will strain for the tiniest opportunity to get your talon implants around the same neck. The strong hairy hand you like to feel on your shoulder becomes a mail fist to be most seriously feared.
“Life is really rather cheap, you know—much cheaper now than in the past…Sometimes I wonder about all those years before you and I were born—though it really doesn’t matter since we have the trivid decks and nostalgia holog cubes. But think how it would have been to live in 1100 instead of 2500, or to have been born an 18th Century prince, or a Kalahari, or a frog—or anything…or nothing? It really doesn’t matter, and it never really did.
“Despite their overt uniqueness, and yours and mine, we are accidents of birth—simple out-and-out accidents. We don’t have any goddam raison d’etre. We ride awhile on this spinning spheroid, get some kicks, and get zonked. What a stupendous put-on! Everyone was so sure there was a difference between the smart and the stupid, peasant and royalty…
“And then anomie arrived on the scene. Did you know that the danger of anomie was predicted as early as 1940? And now we are cohesive because of the auto-decimator principle. Who would have predicted that programmed obsolescence would spread to us pediats? And that we would be able to foist it onto the adults?
“I felt unbelieving—really tearfully crushed—when I got my first patricide inputs. I was about four, which is roughly equivalent to the ancient mental age level of about sixteen, and my intellective parameters were beginning to peak. My father, my putfat at the time, was hugging me, and I was getting funny little incest signals. Then I got a vivid engram, bold and blaring and clear: I could see myself eviscerating him with a tiny buzz saw— I felt the actual imprinting! My circuits felt solid-stated, all the synapses in the maze coalesced, baked instantly to porcelain. I felt kinesthetic cues, body English, I grunted, and gave a little lunge. It was like unzipping him from neck to dick, and then wet meaty things fell out. I gagged and he hugged me tighter. I think he knew what had happened.
“We can play and fantasize and live in trivid flashbacks, and we can get great pure hedonistic kicks, and we can feel almost any way we want. But, my favorite little pony, our destiny is to kill our parents…
Jonas listens and a pterodactyl labors past on groaning leathery wings, pursued by a six year-old in a flitter. Borealis streamers glimmer faintly in the darkening sky. The air smells of musk and pollen, exhaust fumes, detergent, brine, wet fur. Jonas clips fresh packets into his nose.
“We can have the provobots maintain a truce for a few days, can’t we?” he says. “I mean, can we do something to ease the pressure—get an insured breathing spell?”
Carol looks vaguely disdainful. “It’s possible. And Jason and Ellen would probably buy it.”
“I need just a few more days for my inputs to crystallize. I can almost see myself with a third eye, and begin to predict how things will go over the long run. But I’m still a little too much like an intern with his first patient, or a pianist at a first recital, or a nurse learning to give injections.” Carol begins a little sigh, but Jonas claps a very strong hand over her wrist. “And don’t take any special goddam credit for being advanced in your inputs—just give me a few more days.”
Carol starts slightly, and for a brief and charming moment looks docile and engaging. Then the steady predatory glint grows in her bright eyes, like embers being stirred. She squeezes Jonas’s hand and blows a puckered kiss at him. “I can feel your strength coursing,” she sounds proud. “Maturation transcends training. Remember that pediatric cliche? It’s as true as anything ever was. Your experience per se is wholly secondary to your intraorganismic unfolding, your cumulative imprinting. We will wait—and we will make the waiting delicious! Race you home! Transport implants—no fair jostling!”
Carol scrambles to her feet, smooths her leatheroid sheath, and runs teasingly across the turf. She looks back at Jonas’s clumsy fumblings and activates her transport implants, lifting off prone, like an albatross. Jonas lifts off and assumes a rudimentary swan-dive position, waggling his short arms as he scuttles off, low over the fleshy grass. Carol autovectors cancan music from her palate stereo implant and ups the decibel weighting to a blare. She skitters through a grove of white aspens, sending the finches up in tiny whirring cones, soars up in a steep angle to about 50 feet altitude, then sets an arrow-straight azimuth for the billet-piston where Jason and Ellen are toying with glowing trig puzzles. Jonas sways behind Carol, like a student pilot jockeying a Piper Cub.
They fly over crumbling apartment towers and lichen-smothered ranch houses; the drill field where 100,000 children were vaporized by the Synod in 2470; the ghetto blocks, all burned out husks of permaplast and astroturf; then the radiating strips of frozen custard, stands, dry cleaners, taco booths, chicken bars, stereo modules, copulation globes, and recycling plants. They skim the blackened mansard roof of a manor house, set afire in the socio-economic war of 2300. Two Mark XIV’s and a Maserati reprod lay rusting in the dry swimming pool. Jonas blats out a surge of anal-expulsive energy and humps onto Carol, dog-fashion. She gives a delighted squeal and spins to embrace him ventral-ventral. They skim over miles of millet fields, truffle grids, and hybrid foliage plots, clinging to each other like mating deerflies.
They land at the community provobot station and requisition two robot bodyguards. They visophone Jason and Ellen and head for home in a terracar driven by the bots.
VII
“Oh, big lumpy clummocks of affectional bullshit, Ellen!” Carol taunts, striding harshly toward the visoport, “it’s a wonder you haven’t been flicked like a bug. You’re maladaptive and weak…Ellen looks tearful.
“I never wanted to hurt you or Jonas—I love you both, and I can’t help it.”
“But stop right there,” Carol’s confidence is luxuriant, “your use of the term love pegs you with the color of the flock—the recessive flock, the maladapts. Listen closely to this, Jonas,” Carol leans past her slate-gray provobot guard to touch Jonas.’
“What do you mean, using an archaic and meaningless word like love, Ellen?” Ellen’s provobot looks consolingly at her and places a humming pneumoflex hand on her knee.
The children snicker at her uneasiness. “Hey, your bot is empathic, and maybe horney,” Carol laughs, “you better try dialing another one.” Jason moves to check the bot’s registration cubicle, his own provobot hulking after him.
The group looks curiously like a sensitivity training class or an encounter circle. Ellen sits tensely on a pale sonic hassock, her oddly solicitous provobot levitating just off the deck beside her. Its physiog plate turns sombre as Jason snaps its de-phasing toggle and extracts a copper-colored readout plate. “You’ve drawn a sociologic coddler,” Jason sighs to Ellen, “this bot’s programmed for domestic court counselling.”
“Ours are orthodox bodyguards,” Jonas pipes up, “with the response orientations of Doberman pinschers, or better still, parameters from Lyndon Johnson’s private security guards.”
Jason fights off a brief regurgitatory response at the name. “Well, no great hassle,” he says irritatedly, “the protective iso is adequate.”
“The ground rules are clear enough,” Carol snaps, “we’re at an agreed truce, enforced by provobots of matched protectiveness.” She all but leers at Ellen. “Tell us about love, Ellen. I want Jonas to get some clarificatory jazz on that subject.”
“I’ve always wanted to be near Jonas,” Ellen says sadly, “I wanted just to look at him, and hold him, and do things for him…have him near me.”
“Why, though?”
“I just did, that’s all.”
“Isn’t it true that your perceptual inputs are richened by Jonas’s charismatic vectors?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t it true that he reinforces your autoworth parameters?”
“Yes, but—”
“And isn’t it true that your affectional feelings for him are precisely mediated by the reinforcement value of his behaviors toward you?”
“I don’t think I understand you, Carol.”
“Don’t you love him—Christ, that word bugs the shit out of me—because he makes you feel good? Because he reaffirms your feelings of self-worth? Would you love him if he were homoncular, or mutated, or asymmetric, or smelly, or dumb?”
“I don’t know—” Ellen sounds squelched.
“Damn right you don’t. And it’s because your intellective parameters barely get past plus or minus one standard deviation. You’ve come fairly close to vaporization a few times, haven’t you? Like, you can’t pull your weight anymore, right? From each, according to his abilities, to each, according to his works. Ellen, my pretty putmot surrogate, you are simply lapsing toward non-contributary societal status. And your espousing love for we who are programmed to replace you in the goods and services matrix is pathognomic evidence of your maladaptive-ness.”
Ellen begins to cry softly.
“Did you cry when you filled the glacier with laser cones?” Carol grates.
“It would have been a quick way to go,” Jason puts in, tentatively, “merciful. Quick.”
“You caught us off guard, daddy-boo,” Jonas jabs a fat fist at Jason. The provobots all tense and Jonas’s fist flicks back from the forcefield isomorph. “You could have fooled me—Hey, kiddies, a ride in the country… we might even get a coolie at Quik-Pik and eat in the car at Taco City…and we can count cows and horsies and play license plate poker and twenny questions—. shit!”
“There aren’t many neat ways left to go,” Jason sounds lame, “neat, in the sense of supra-clever coups. All the Hitchcock ploys ran out years ago, and the Amontillado paradigm has been run into the ground. Hansel and Gretel is not bad, and somebody down the block just did the old Russian Roulette bit. Decided to ease the anxiety and do it on raw chance. And then, one of the kids lost!”
