James Kelly - Rewired - The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

“It’s a very dangerous world out there, Miss Social Counselor.”

“Oh, tell me about it,” Mabel scoffed. “I’ve worked suicide hotlines! I’ve been a hostage negotiator! I’m a career social worker, girlfriend! I’ve seen more horror and suffering than you ever will. While you were doing push-ups in some comfy cracker training-camp, I’ve been out here in the real world!” Mabel absently unscrewed the top from the bike bottle and had a long glug. “What on earth are you doing trying to raid the squat of a bicycle repairman?”

Kitty’s stony silence lengthened.

“It’s got something to do with that settop box,” Lyle offered. “It showed up here in delivery yesterday, and then she showed up just a few hours later. Started flirting with me, and said she wanted to live in here. Of course I got suspicious right away.”

“Naturally,” Pete said. “Real bad move, Kitty. Lyle’s on antilibidinals.”

Kitty stared at Lyle bitterly. “I see,” she said at last. “So that’s what you get, when you drain all the sex out of one of them… You get a strange malodorous creature that spends all its time working in the garage.”

Mabel flushed. “Did you hear that?” She gave Kitty’s bag a sharp angry yank. “What conceivable right do you have to question this citizen’s sexual orientation? Especially after cruelly trying to sexually manipulate him to abet your illegal purposes? Have you lost all sense of decency? You…you should be sued.”

“Do your worst,” Kitty muttered.

“Maybe I will,” Mabel said grimly. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

“Yeah, let’s string her up somewhere real sunny and public and call a bunch of news crews,” Pete said. “I’m way hot for this deep ninja gear! Me and the Spiders got real mojo uses for these telescopic ears, and the tracer dust, and the epoxy bugging devices. And the press-on climbing-claws. And the carbon-fiber rope. Everything, really! Everything except these big-ass military shoes of hers, which really suck.”

“Hey, all that stuff’s mine,” Lyle said sternly. “I saw it first.”

“Yeah, I guess so, but…. Okay, Lyle, you make us a deal on the gear, we’ll forget everything you still owe us for doing the shop.”

“Come on, those combat spex are worth more than this place all by themselves.”

“I’m real interested in that settop box,” Mabel said cruelly. “It doesn’t look too fancy or complicated. Let’s take it over to those dirty circuit zudes who hang out at the Blue Parrot, and see if they can’t reverse-engineer it. We’ll post all the schematics up on twenty or thirty progressive activist networks, and see what falls out of cyberspace.”

Kitty glared at her. “The terrible consequences from that stupid and irresponsible action would be entirely on your head.”

“I’ll risk it,” Mabel said airily, patting her cloche hat. “It might bump my soft little liberal head a bit, but I’m pretty sore it would crack your nasty little fascist head like a coconut.”

Suddenly Kitty began thrashing and kicking her way furiously inside the bag. They watched with interest as she ripped, tore, and lashed out with powerful side and front kicks. Nothing much happened.

“All right,” she said at last, panting in exhaustion. “I’ve come from Senator Creighton’s office.”

“Who?” Lyle said.

“Creighton! Senator James P. Creighton, the man who’s been your Senator from Tennessee for the past thirty years!”

“Oh,” Lyle said. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“We’re anarchists,” Pete told her.

“I’ve sure heard of the nasty old geezer,” Mabel said, “but I’m from British Columbia, where we change senators the way you’d change a pair of socks. If you ever changed your socks, that is. What about him?”

“Well, Senator Creighton has deep clout and seniority! He was a United States Senator even before the first NAFTA Senate was convened! He has a very large, and powerful, and very well-seasoned personal staff of twenty thousand hardworking people, with a lot of pull in the Agriculture, Banking, and Telecommunications Committees!”

“Yeah? So?”

“So,” Kitty said miserably, “there are twenty thousand of us on his staff. We’ve been in place for decades now, and naturally we’ve accumulated lots of power and importance. Senator Creighton’s staff is basically running some quite large sections of the NAFTA government, and if the Senator loses his office, there will be a great deal of…of unnecessary political turbulence.” She looked up. “You might not think that a senator’s staff is all that important politically. But if people like you bothered to learn anything about the real-life way that your government functions, then you’d know that Senate staffers can be really crucial.”

Mabel scratched her head. “You’re telling me that even a lousy senator has his own private black-bag unit?”

Kitty looked insulted. “He’s an excellent senator! You can’t have a working organization of twenty thousand staffers without taking security very seriously! Anyway, the Executive wing has had black-bag units for years! It’s only right that there should be a balance of powers.”

“Wow,” Mabel said. “The old guy’s a hundred and twelve or something, isn’t he?”

“A hundred and seventeen.”

“Even with government health care, there can’t be a lot left of him.”

“He’s already gone,” Kitty muttered. “His frontal lobes are burned out…. He can still sit up, and if he’s stoked on stimulants he can repeat whatever’s whispered to him. So he’s got two permanent implanted hearing aids, and basically…well…he’s being run by remote control by his mook.”

“His mook, huh?” Pete repeated thoughtfully.

“It’s a very good mook,” Kitty said. “The coding’s old, but it’s been very well looked-after. It has firm moral values and excellent policies. The mook is really very much like the Senator was. It’s just that, well, it’s old. It still prefers a really old-fashioned media environment. It spends almost all its time watching old-fashioned public political coverage, and lately it’s gotten cranky and started broadcasting commentary.”

“Man, never trust a mook,” Lyle said. “I hate those things.”

“So do I,” Pete offered, “but even a mook comes off pretty good compared to a politician.”

“I don’t really see the problem,” Mabel said, puzzled. “Senator Hirschheimer from Arizona has had a direct neural link to his mook for years, and he has an excellent progressive voting record. Same goes for Senator Marmalejo from Tamaulipas; she’s kind of absentminded, and everybody knows she’s on life support, but she’s a real scrapper on women’s issues.”

Kitty looked up. “You don’t think it’s terrible?”

Mabel shook her head. “I’m not one to be judgmental about the intimacy of one’s relationship to one’s own digital alter-ego. As far as I can see it, that’s a basic privacy issue.”

“They told me in briefing that it was a very terrible business, and that everyone would panic if they learned that a high government official was basically a front for a rogue artificial intelligence.”

Mabel, Pete, and Lyle exchanged glances. “Are you guys surprised by that news?” Mabel said.

“Heck no,” said Pete. “Big deal,” Lyle added.

Something seemed to snap inside Kitty then. Her head sank. “Disaffected émigrés in Europe have been spreading boxes that can decipher the Senator’s commentary. I mean, the Senator’s mook’s commentary…. The mook speaks just like the Senator did, or the way the Senator used to speak, when he was in private and off the record. The way he spoke in his diaries. As far as we can tell, the mook was his diary…. It used to be his personal laptop computer. But he just kept transferring the files, and upgrading the software, and teaching it new tricks like voice recognition and speechwriting, and giving it power of attorney and such…. And then, one day the mook made a break for it. We think that the mook sincerely believes that it’s the Senator.”