John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Leaning back in his chair, Badoit said at last, “I agree that military intervention is necessary. But you propose that I do it under the auspices of the NR. And indeed, I would feel the need to work within the framework of some such organization—I do not want to send my people in cold. Just getting them into Paris would be difficult without you. But… it would be a political time bomb for me. Dealing with you; with, if you will forgive the expression, infidels. There are people who would use this connection to denounce me. I have much support, but… not from everyone.”

“You can trust me not to—”

“Can we?” Badoit interrupted. “Can I trust you with my fighting men? You know, you would have some authority over my soldiers—it would be a very delicate situation. I would have to trust you. I cannot take the chance without investigating you somewhat more thoroughly.”

“What does that mean, precisely?” Steinfeld asked.

Badoit spoke a brisk phrase in Arabic into the intercom.

Almost instantly, four heavily armed men came into the room. Abu Badoit turned to Steinfeld, rose, made an ironic variation of the gracious gesture offering accommodation, and said, “It means you’re my guest, for a while. It is only a matter of attitude, really, the distinction between guest and prisoner —don’t you agree?”

She said her name was Jo Ann Teyk. And, she said, that morning she’d found something in her brain that scared her.

She was here at the lab complaining that Cooper Research Labs had used her brain for some kind of “calculations,” if he understood her rightly, and the stuff scared her. She wanted it erased. And Barrabas knew, almost instantly, that he fancied her. He wasn’t sure why. She was at least ten years older than him, her curly blond hair in no particular style, just flouncing to her shoulders any way it chose; her eyes were pale blue and her features were, somehow, reminiscent of the Dutch. But her accent was American.

They were standing awkwardly in the waiting room of Lab Six, Cooper Research Labs, a waiting room that hadn’t been used, till now, in all the weeks Barrabas had worked here. A lab technician had fetched Barrabas, because this Jo Ann Teyk woman was asking for Cooper, and Barrabas was the only assistant to Cooper currently in the building.

“Dr. Cooper isn’t here,” Barrabas said. “He’s in Paris. He’s coming back tomorrow, I think. I could try to get him on the fone—”

“Would you? This thing is really bothering me. The Brain Bank won’t be held responsible, they say. They won’t pay for the erasing time, and I can’t afford to pay for it. I’m trying to save up to get back to the States. Flights to New York are just outrageously overpriced now because they haven’t got the war damage at the airports fully repaired and…”

She was rattling on rather nervously, and he nodded in the appropriate places, but he was only half listening. He was staring at her, wondering why she was so attractive to him. She wasn’t beautiful. He pictured her in one of those old-fashioned white cloth hats, almost like nurse hats, the Dutch women had worn. Nothing sexy about that. She was moderately pretty. Her breasts were small and her hips a shade too wide. But she gave off something indefinable. Energy. Need. Maybe something seen in the warm ghostliness of her glance, a subtle female vitality and…

Sexuality, yes, somehow, though she wasn’t dressed for it. She was wearing a rather weathered charcoal-blue printout women’s suit and blue transparent-plastic sandals. He was glad she wasn’t wearing heels; she was already at least three inches taller than he was. He was glad, too, he hadn’t had to wear his SAISC uniform to work in the lab. People sometimes reacted nastily to it. People on the street who saw you in an SA uniform seemed to either wink at you, give you a sort of illicit approval, or else they’d glare and you had a sense they’d like to tell you off but didn’t dare.

“…I mean,” Jo was saying, “you do see the problem, don’t you?”

“Hmm? Oh, oh yeah—” He broke off and grinned. “Actually, no. I’m a bit muddled on this Brain Bank business. Had the impression they hired people to do calculations or something. You’re a mathematician, or—?”

“No. No, I’m an artist, or was. I’m an American.”

No kidding, he thought. Her American accent was like a trumpet declaring her nationality.

She went on, “I had a show over here when the war started, and I’ve basically been stuck in London ever since. My patrons all sort of… some of them are dead now. The others I can’t find. The gallery was burnt in the food riots, all my work gone. Digital paintings.”

“Really? I do some, uh, digi-vid work myself. Just a little editing, nothing artistic. We have a Sony Ampex system. Doing a sort of documentary.”

Clam up, he thought. He turned to the video painting on the wall: a rectangle of wafer-thin glass playing a loop of collaged digital imagery, soothing pastoral scenes, pictures of rustic North Country villagers and the like, all bathed in a kind of halcyon ambience. He nodded at it. “What do you think of that one?”

She seemed annoyed at being distracted to make art criticism, glanced irritably at the videol painting. “I think it’s a decoration meant to go with the furniture, not a painting. Not a real one. Facile interior design background stuff.”

“Yeah, I see what you mean,” he said, looking at it more critically. Although he didn’t see what she meant particularly.

“Well, back on the subject: if you don’t know what Brain Banks are…” She made a fluttery gesture of frustration, and then said, “It’s a… essentially, they rent a portion of your brain, see. Companies who can’t afford high-speed mainframe time. Or just trying to save money, cut some corners. So they hire a ‘passive’—that’s what I was, at this Brain Bank—and they attach a dermal contact socket and access your brain for computer time. And you just lie there and let them use it, let them do all the thinking with a part of your brain you don’t normally use. You can be thinking of something else entirely, and all this stuff is buzzing around in the… in the very back of the mind. Sort of.”

He blinked at her in confusion. “They… hook into your brain somehow?”

“Yeah. The human brain can do some things better than computers: holo-imaging, certain kinds of computer-model elaboration, and the kind of stuff they were trying to develop artificial intelligence for. Certain kinds of complex thinking, see. And if you interface with a biochip, the brain is capable of all these, like, remarkably complex calculations and storage in parts of the brain we don’t usually use much. A ‘passive’, you know, rents those out to people. Sort of like transients selling blood to a blood bank. The pay is better, but not all that much.”

“And you just sit there wired in, and the data…”

“It just flashes by in your brain. Too quick to comprehend, usually. You don’t usually remember anything afterward, see. All you got left is this weird taste in your mouth and a headache. Normally. But I guess sometimes the operator is sloppy with the erase function—sometimes the stuff remains in your brain. And it can flash onto your conscious mind, see, and bug you. I mean, I’m walking down the street, and then all of a sudden I see about a trillion numbers flashing by instead of the cars, and I see these, uh, molecular models instead of buildings. It was so fucking weird. It was like the numbers were the cars and the molecules were the buildings. And I walk into a wall or something. It blinds me. And it wakes me up at night. It’s like someone’s talking statistics in your ear all the time. You can’t sleep with all that—”