Филип Керр - The Second Angel

‘Be careful,’ she said, quietly.

‘We’ll just have the one bottle.’

‘I was referring to Rimmer.’

‘Oh him. He’s not invited.’

‘Don’t joke about this, Dallas. Please. I think you’re underestimating him. Just as you’re overestimating the ethical standards of this company.’

Dallas wiped the smile from his face and, affecting a look of great gravitas, faced his nonexistent assistant.

‘Okay,’ he said solemnly. ‘I’ll be careful.’

‘And you’ll think about what I said?’

‘Yes. I’ll think about it very carefully.’

‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’

Dallas went to find Tanaka. ‘Computers,’ he muttered quietly. ‘Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.’

The Huxley Hotel was a favorite watering hole for all the Terotechnology designers. With its well-spaced windows, it might have been some Florentine palazzo of the High Renaissance. But a romance, even an architectural one, can be as easily dampened as inspired by climate, and inside the Huxley, a cortile that might have remained open to the warmer fifteenth-century sky was protected from the freezing cold of the twenty-first by a modern glass roof. [44] During the past century, the effect of global warming has not been to increase temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, as scientists once predicted, but, as a result of its impact on the Gulf Stream, to cool it. During the early years of this century, a massive flow of melt-water from the Greenland Ice Sheet put an end to the Gulf Stream, triggering a near calamitous cooling throughout northwestern Europe.

Dallas and Tanaka left their thick fur coats in the cloakroom and mounted a wide stairway. The soaring and hugely expensive Neo-Modernist [45] What is Neo-Modernism in architecture? This is not the surrealist phase of Modernism once suggested by the twentieth-century critic Frank Kermode, but something else. The essence of the movement is that we live in a world in which everything is subject to rapid change. So rapid that for a designer to try and make sense of change, or even to keep up with it, is impossible. Thus the hallmark of Neo-Modernism is impermanence: Since fashion quickly reduces all design to stylistic desuetude, it is only the transient and the unfinished that have any real meaning and significance. Perhaps the most famous example of a Neo-Modernist building is the new European Parliament building in Berlin. interior revealed a building as though in the later stages of decommissioning: Plaster had been scraped from interior walls exposing patches of bare brickwork; semidismantled machinery lay rusting on the unpolished wooden floor of the enormous lobby; and an intricate system of stairs, ducts, pipes, and chains ornamented the open-plan structure like metal cobwebs.

The bar was on the first floor, a room of more pleasing solidity that ran the length of the building and hoarded an almost priceless store of real wines, as opposed to the molecular drink machines that were to be found in cheaper bars — the kind of machines that rearrange human urine into Dom Perignon, Benedictine, or just plain beer.

Dallas approached the bar and ordered a five-thousand-dollar bottle of authenticated Chateau Mouton Rothschild ’05 and a couple of genuine Cohiba Esplendidos. For a while he and Tanaka talked the big talk of connoisseurship before the conversation drew back to the multifaceted world of Rational Environment design, Terotechnology, and their respective Motion Parallax assistants.

‘I’ve got two of them now,’ admitted Tanaka.

‘So I heard,’ said Dallas.

‘You did?’ Tanaka looked concerned by this information.

‘Dixy told me.’

‘She say anything more about it?’

‘No. Just that you had two assistants.’

Tanaka nodded and looked a little more reassured. ‘It’s not that I need two, of course,’ he said. ‘But they keep each other company.’

‘I don’t think mine would like me to get another assistant,’ said Dallas. ‘She’s the jealous type.’ Seeing Tanaka smile, he shrugged, and added, ‘So I fixed it for her to have a little dog instead. In case she got lonely.’

‘Of course, when I say they keep each other company, I mean they really keep each other company. You know what I’m saying. Intimate company.’ Tanaka’s laugh held an obscene edge. ‘Drop by my office sometime and take a look for yourself. It’s a real floor show. I mean there’s nothing they won’t do to each other. I swear, they’re like a couple of animals.’

‘Mine’s in love with me.’

‘Well, of course she is. That’s all part of the program. It’s what was on your digital thought recording, right? She always loves you, always wants to fuck you, always does what she’s told.’

‘No, there’s something else.’ Dallas shrugged. ‘It’s a little hard to explain. But sometimes I get the feeling that the hardware’s made the leap. You know? An evolving silicon-based organism. Digital DNA becomes artificial life.’

‘Come on, Dallas, you don’t really believe that life in silico bullshit, do you?’

Dallas thought for a moment and then laughed. ‘No, I guess not. But sometimes I get this weird sensation that there’s more to them than we know.’

Tanaka puffed the cigar into life and shook his head. ‘People have been talking about crap like this for years. And it’s not ever going to happen. They’re intelligent, sure. Smarter than us, some of them. But not alive. That’s just a cosmic-metaphysical joke dreamed up by some writer.’

‘Sometimes I think that’s the way future ideas get started,’ said Dallas. ‘With a writer and a metaphysical joke. There are some historians who believe man wouldn’t have invented the atomic bomb unless H. G. Wells had thought of it first. Rutherford was adamant that it couldn’t be done. Some joke.’

‘You want to see something really funny, then you come by my office. My new assistant? The Motion Parallax is based on the director’s wife. The ex-model trophy bride. Jasmine.’

‘Are you crazy? Suppose he finds out?’

‘Why should he find out? You’re the only one I’ve told.’

‘Dixy knew about it.’

‘Yeah. But she didn’t know that it’s Jasmine we’re talking about.’

‘She didn’t say. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t know.’

Tanaka shook his head. ‘What the hell. She’s a fabulous-looking woman, Dallas. A real beauty. Genetically engineered perfection.’

‘I know. I was at the wedding.’

‘Oh, me too. That’s when I made the recording.’

‘If King knew you’d created a Motion Parallax based on a digital thought recording of his wife, he’d fire you immediately.’

Dallas shook his head and drank some of the excellent red wine. The year 2005 had been a truly great one for Bordeaux: a wet spring, followed by a really hot summer — one of the last good years they had before the climate changed and wine making got more or less wiped out.

‘Dixy thinks the company intends to get rid of me.’

‘Come on, Dallas,’ said Tanaka, frowning uncertainly.

‘That’s what Dixy reckons anyway,’ sighed Dallas. ‘What do you think, Kazuo?’

‘You are an outstanding designer, Dallas. The outstanding designer. Other companies would kill to get you working for them.’

‘Maybe. Maybe that’s just the point.’

‘No, no,’ Tanaka insisted. ‘They wouldn’t ever let you go. It’d be like the company cutting off its own right arm.’

‘Arms can be replaced.’

‘With poor substitutes.’

‘If anything happened to me, Kaz, you’d be the new chief designer.’

‘No one could replace you, Dallas. It’s quite unthinkable. Like that atom bomb project without Oppenheimer.’