Philip Kerr: Gridiron

'Didn't I tell you? We decided to give the A-life a name.'

'Sam Gleig is on the atrium floor,' said the computer.

'Take us there, please, Abraham.' He grinned at Mitch. 'Besides, it's a hell of a lot better than what Cheech and Chong used to call the YU-5 configuration. The Mathematical Analyser Numerator Integrator and Computer. M-A-N-I-A-C? Get it?'

The doors closed.

'Abraham. I guess it's OK,' said Mitch. 'You know, every time I hear its voice I wonder where I've heard it before.'

'It's Alec Guinness,' said Kenny. 'You know, the old English guy who was in Star Wars . We had him in the studio for a whole weekend so that we could digitize his voice. Of course Abraham can sample damn near any sound he wants, but for sustained speech you need to have an actor to give you a proper linguistic base. We researched Guinness against a dozen other actors' voices, including Glenn Close, James Earl Jones, Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood.'

'Clint Eastwood?' Mitch sounded surprised. 'In an elevator ?'

'Yeah, but Guinness came out the best. People thought he sounded very reassuring. The English accent, I suppose. Not that we're restricted to English, though. There are eighty-six languages spoken in LA and Abraham is programmed to understand and respond to them all.'

The elevator doors opened on to the atrium and the waft of a pleasant, synthetically dispensed scent of cedar wood. Mitch and Kenny walked across a white marble floor that was still covered in a layer of protective film, towards the hologram console where a security guard was standing. Seeing the two men he withdrew his attention from the top of the huge tree that dominated the atrium and walked to meet them halfway.

'Good morning, gentlemen,' he said. 'How are you today?'

'Morning, Sam,' said Mitch. 'Sam, one of those demonstators just threw something at my car. It was only a piece of rotten fruit, but I thought I'd mention it.'

The three of them walked over to the front door and stared through the armoured Plexiglas at the small group of demonstrators behind the police barrier at the foot of the steps that led down on to the piazza . The motorcycle cop guarding them was sitting sidesaddle on his bike and reading a newspaper.

'You might have a word with the officer who is supposed to be keeping an eye on them,' added Mitch. 'I don't want to make anything out of it, but I wouldn't like this sort of thing to become a habit, OK?'

'No, sir, I understand,' said Gleig. 'I'll certainly mention it to him.'

'Have they caused any trouble before?' asked Kenny.

'Trouble, sir? No, sir.' Sam Gleig grinned. He raised one pizza-sized hand from the 9-millimetre automatic he kept holstered on his hip and tapped the tinted glass with his knuckles. 'Besides, what could they do?

This stuff is 200 mills thick. It can take anything from a 12-gauge shotgun to a 7.62-millimetre NATO rifle bullet without leaving a mark. You know something, Mr Kenny? This is about the safest job I ever had. Fact is, I reckon it's about the safest place in the whole of LA.' He laughed a big, slow laugh that echoed across the atrium floor: a shopping mall Santa Glaus.

Mitch and Kenny smiled and retraced their steps to the elevators.

'He's right,' said Kenny. 'This is the safest building in LA. You could hold a Russian parliament in this place.'

'You reckon I should maybe tell him about the problem with the feng shui ?' said Mitch.

'Hell, no,' Kenny laughed. 'You might spoil his day.'

Mitch and Kenny held very different views of the Gridiron. Mitch looked at it from the outside in, and Kenny from the inside out. For Kenny, the Gridiron was the nearest thing to an actual physical body that any computer had ever had. The Yu-5 configuration was able to see and feel almost everything through an array of building management and security systems analogous to the receptors that provided man with his sensory capacities. The analogy had influenced Beech and Yojo, the Yu5's designers, even to the extent of programming the computer with what they called an 'observer illusion'. In essence, Abraham had been endowed with the sensation of being distributed in space and time and presiding over the chaos of his numerous perceptions and stimuli. It was, Kenny had joked, a case of 'I compute, therefore I am.'

The computer was encouraged to think of itself as the brain in the body of the building, connected to the body's functions by means of a central nervous system: the multiplex cabling system. Its visual process was provided by an elaborate system of closed-circuit television cameras, as well as a complicated system of passive infrared detectors both inside and outside the building. The auditory process resourced acoustic and ultra-sonic detectors as well as the omnidirectional microphones that facilitated access to the elevators, doors, telephones and computer workstations via the TESPAR system. The olfactory process, by which the computer was able to control and manufacture the synthetic odours within the building, was achieved via stereo-isometric and paranosmiac electrical sensors that were sensitive to a range of 1/400,000,000th of a milligram per litre of air.

The rest of the computer's sensory reception, by which it was possible for the building to react to changes in its external or internal environment, were broadly comparable to the human organism's kinesthenic and vestibular senses.

There were few if any stimuli that the computer was not able to transform from an energy change into a vital process.

As Kenny saw it, the Yu-5 computer and the Gridiron represented the most advanced stage of Cartesian logic — mathematics as the unifying glue of a rationalized world.

At a quarter to one, Cheng Peng Fei left his fellow protesters on the piazza outside the Gridiron and walked north towards the Freeway, regarding the vagrants and the panhandlers along his route with the expert indifference of someone who knew the greater poverty of SouthEast Asia. A black man wearing a Dodgers baseball cap and smelling like a dungheap fell into step beside him. My own fault for going on foot, the young Chinese told himself.

'Spare some change, please, man?'

Cheng Peng Fei looked the other way and walked on, despising the derelict who had already dropped behind, thinking that in China, no matter how poor you were, you worked and supported yourself. He cared about the poor, but only the ones who were unable to help themselves. Not the ones who looked as though they were fit for work.

He turned east down Sunset Boulevard and on the corner of North Spring Street entered the Mon Kee Seafood Restaurant.

The place was crowded, but the man he was looking for, a tough but good-looking Japanese, was easy enough to spot in his navy-blue Comme des Gargons suit. Cheng sat down opposite him and picked up a menu.

'This is a good place,' said the Japanese, speaking English with just a slight American accent. 'Thanks for recommending it. I'll come here again.'

Cheng Peng Fei shrugged, indifferent to whether the Japanese liked the place or not. His grandfather came from Nanking and he knew enough of what had happened there in the 1930s to dislike the Japanese thoroughly. He decided to move the conversation along.

'We've begun the demonstration again, like you suggested,' he said.

'So I saw. Not as many as I'd hoped, though.'

'People went home for the holidays.'

'So find more.' The Japanese glanced around the restaurant. 'Maybe a few of these waiters would like to earn some easy money. Shit, it's not even illegal. How often can you say that these days?' He reached into his coat pocket, drew out a manila envelope and pushed it across the table.