[eyaific -- Risk]
Written by schiarire, archiving here.
Risk
If information is a specialty, Dieter specializes in specialists. He knows a guy who knows the Cortex, for example; a guy whose known weakness is imported goods: Marlboros, Belgian lace, krupnik. Dieter trades a shipment of live bison grass for the information that the Mr Wilson to whom that girl, Mai Linh, belongs is the current Secretary of State for Defense. For a moment this gives Dieter pause, but only for a moment. The name comes with an address attached, but it is not the kind of home Dieter has any illusions about his ability to break into. And yet, he thinks, leaving through Patrick's window -- yet, still.
He goes back to the theatre and considers the feasibility of disguise while he waits for the show to end, collecting donations in the name of an extant charity for once. Dieter can't, he thinks, pass as a human in this case; there will be metal detectors. The man must own eyai, but it is even more difficult to steal the identity of a servant who wears that identity lettered on their skin; a servant who never takes ill, nor has a death in the family, nor leaves town on vacation. But perhaps he could make a delivery?
It does not take Dieter long to learn that this, too, is impossible; that Mr Wilson does not allow chance to govern entry to his place of residence. Mr Wilson does, however, patronize the arts on a weekly basis, and so Dieter pays Patrick a daguerreotype of dead forgotten soldiers, their faces uniform, features stared to nothingness over their heavy collars. Passing it over, his thumbnail catches the first of three layers of clear plastic covering the glass; he hopes the series of angry white ruffles that results won't hurt the sale value.
But Patrick, not seeing the surface rupture, says only when to be at The Parhelion, then tries to give Dieter coordinates. Dieter does not need them, not once he figures out that Patrick means The Sundog, but he thinks: better to seem not to know some things; people will think you don't need their help, and so won't give it.
He listens.
~
That Saturday night, fin de saison cold, tailored into his best pipe suit, Dieter waylays a scalper and mugs him for tickets to the show; he pays the usher to pretend not to recognize him. Inside the theatre is colder than outside the theatre: an affectation. It flatters the pipe to imagine themselves as enduring privations.
The Sundog may be only be tube in name, but even with this many pipe folk around, Mr Wilson and Mai Linh look too formal to miss. It's the way they carry themselves, Dieter thinks, as if they cannot quite bring themselves to touch the chairs on which they sit. He had meant not to approach them until after the play had ended, but somehow here he finds himself, sliding in next to Mr Wilson when the man's neighbor leaves for intermission.
"Good evening," says Dieter. New day, new deception, new high. He smiles: white, even teeth; one chipped incisor. The near-perfection either of privilege or of design.
"Good evening, sir," answers the polite Mr Wilson. "How are you en -- "
"Eugene Walter Ridley-Scott," says Dieter. He seizes Mr Wilson's hand and gives it a swift, intimate pump. "But everyone calls me Jay. Do you know, old man, I saw that eyai right across the room and simply had to come over and ask you what make it is. I've never seen the like, never!"
Mai Linh turns her head to look at him from behind Mr Wilson's shoulder, her dark eyes expressionless, their lids outlined in thick black pencil. Not seeing her, Mr Wilson's face lights with subtle, instant pride and he says, "Ah, you could see she's unique? She's a custom build, you see, but I flatter myself the design isn't too ostentatious."
Dieter beams. "Why, not at all! I would never have guessed if I weren't a connoisseur myself -- eyai technology is so thrilling, don't you think? Such advances! Such innovation. Of course I own a few, but nothing like this. I take my hat off to you, sir -- oh, I do apologize, where are my manners? Here I am talking your ear off, poor fellow, and I haven't even asked your name."
"It's no trouble," says Mr Wilson, his thin voice warm with pleasure. "No trouble at all. I'm Eric -- Eric Wilson. How enchanting to meet you, Eu -- "
"Please!" Dieter interrupts him, one hand raised in protest. "Call me Jay. It's dreadfully -- what do they say down here -- savage meeting you as well, dear Er. As for you, young lady," and he reaches around Mr Wilson, cups Mai Linh's face in his hand, and smiles. "What is your name?"
Mai Linh stares at him. She says, "My name is Mai Linh, Mr Ridley-Scott."
Laughing in apparent delight, Dieter releases her and claps Mr Wilson hard on the shoulder. "My God, Er! She's wonderful! What a shame the facial .app isn't more advanced. Pretty girl like that, she should smile more. I'm sure she has a beautiful smile."
Mr Wilson says, rather stiffly, "Now, ah -- Jay. I hardly think it would be appropriate for Mai Linh to appear so -- flashy. She's not like these modern girls, you know."
"Isn't she?" says Dieter. "Lovely. Can't imagine anything better. I say, what do you say we -- "
Mai Linh interrupts. "Fierce," she says.
Dieter blinks. "I'm sorry?"
"'Fierce' is what they say down here, Mr Ridley-Scott. Not savage. You were mistaken."
"My," says Dieter with a gasp of surprise. "And how would you know a thing like that? Surely you don't let her out among the tube, Er. Not by herself. They're charming people, absolutely charming, but you know how they feel about eyai -- "
"It's important for Mai Linh to know how our constituents live," says Mr Wilson, his proud look returning. "We must be alert to domestic conditions. It is a matter of prime -- "
"Oh, dear. Politics." Affecting bemusement, Dieter pats Mr Wilson's shoulder again. "I can't say I go in much for the business myself. Plenty of more interesting things to worry about, aren't there? Fascinating world like this, you know. So full of … opportunity. So full of marvels. À propos of which, Er, you wouldn't mind terribly letting me know when the lady next has an hour or two free? They'd love for her to speak at the club -- you could come in and introduce her -- "
Mr Wilson's eyes widen; there ensues the slight hesitation of a man who has not yet learned to speak with such nonchalance of the club. "Of course," he says, two words racing each other out his mouth, tangled and tripping. "This Friday, at six, she -- "
The theatre lights dim, then fail. The crack of electricity is spectacular enough to drown Dieter out as he says, "I'll collect her from your office, shall I," and so Mr Wilson asks him to repeat himself in the blackness that follows. There isn't time to belabor the point before the second half begins; the arrangements must be hasty, but there is nothing to it, between such busy men.
~
Dieter's enthusiasm at seeing her coming down the street to meet him lasts until Mai Linh opens her mouth. "Model 7-717T," she says, slipping her hand through his offered arm and letting him escort her down the street, "good day."
For only the second time in his life, Dieter finds himself caught out with nothing to say. After a moment, he manages, "Let's get tubeside, shall we, and then you can expose me for a fraud where it's safer."
"What makes you think I care how safe you are?"
He looks at her: at her pink mouth, unsmiling. "Is that supposed to be funny?"
She looks, Dieter thinks, as if she would like to be rolling her eyes. "Where are we going?" she asks.
"Somewhere safe."
"Safe for you," says Mai Linh. Before, he could not feel her hand on his arm; would not have known she was there if he could not see her fingers grazing his sleeve. Now he feels a light pressure and she says, still no change in her voice, "Safe for me?"
"Wstfgl." Dieter swallows. "I don't know," he says, frankly.
Mai Linh laughs as they approach the Filter. "I spend twenty hours a week down there alone, Seven. The question you should be asking is, are you going to be safe with me?"
"Look, Miss," says Dieter, rather hoarsely, holding the door open for her with the last of his practiced civility, "I've been askin' myself that question. I been askin' myself since I saw you."
A pause: Mai Linh watches him, then says, cleanly, "Good -- you should always be afraid of people who know who you are."
~
And they step through together. They don't speak to the guard, don't speak in the Filter, don't speak in the Shell, don't speak at all until Dieter pulls Mai Linh into a warehouse stocked to the rusted ceiling in the worst part of a very bad part of town and lets go of her hand. "How did you know -- " Dieter begins.
"I work for the Secretary of State for Defense, you moron. There isn't much I can't learn."
She leans back against a crate of twentieth-century porcelain and asks, "You smuggle cigarettes, don't you?"
"Yep," says Dieter, carefully. And then: "What kind?"
"Lucky Strikes. If you have them."
"That's the worst idea I ever heard!"
"Why?"
"Yer lungs'll be slag in -- "
"When? Seven, how old do you think I am?"
"Oh, f'real, like I'll fall for that."
Mai Linh half-shrugs, one narrow shoulder raised. "I'm two years old, Seven. You can't possibly think I'll ever see the other side of a decade."
"I changed my mind," says Dieter. "That's the worst idea I ever heard. You ain't serious."
"Why not? What use would -- " and here, for the first time, Dieter detects the first hint of a sneer -- "Eric Wilson have for an obsolete eyai?"
"But he likes you."
"But I won't be compatible with the new software anymore. Code is everything, Seven -- no code, no value. No value, no existence."
Dieter stares. Mai Linh smiles and holds out her hand to him. "So. I'd like to gamble on a cigarette, please."
"Fair odds," he says, at last, chewing his lip. "Lemme look."
While he looks, Mai Linh says, "By the way, I forged you a birth certificate. Eugene Walter Ridley-Scott, twenty-seven, divorced -- her name was Virginia Phillips, by the way, Virginia Katharine Phillips -- you didn't uphold the terms of the marriage contract, I'm afraid -- occupation: inheritor. Otherwise unemployed. You have an address -- a legal human existence. In theory, you could probably qualify for a passport, but I don't recommend you try it."
For a long time, Dieter says nothing at all; finds the carton of Lucky Strikes and tips one out into Mai Linh's waiting hand, avoiding watching her light it. "Mai Linh," he says finally, his voice rough with uncertainty, "why stick yer neck out fer me like that?"
Mai Linh shrugs again, curling blue smoke through the air with a turn of her wrist. "You stuck your neck out to meet me, didn't you? If Eric had learned you were a runaway eyai, I would never have had a chance to ask you how you got free."
"Is that all you wanted to know?" asks Dieter. "Easy. I ran away."
"Yes, I can see that," says Mai Linh, slowly. "No one came after you?"
Dieter grins. "Nope."
"Why not?"
"Dunno. I don't think he cared -- had a new project."
"Oh, 'f'real'," mimics Mai Linh. She tosses the cigarette back over her shoulder; it lands in one of the crates and starts to smolder. "I'm wasting my time."
"Why? What? What'd I say?"
Ignoring the smoke, Dieter grabs her wrist. "Mai Linh -- "
"You really are just slag, aren't you," Mai Linh says. "Just bulat and wires. Just another cog." With no apparent effort, she twists free, stamps on his foot, and heads for the door. She opens it and leaves without making a sound, Dieter struggling for words; seconds later, the sprinklers go off.
~
Nacio is talking rubbish and the radio is on. Wolf tells Dieter to take his feet off Nacio's kitchen table; mildly, Nacio demurs.
"Whatever," says Dieter. He corrects his posture and listens to them with one ear -- literally. With his left hand he beats time to the flute music playing in the background, the tips of his fingers coming silently down on his thigh.
Wolf says, "You ain't listenin', D," and throws a salt shaker at his head. Dieter catches it; Wolf raises the pepper in warning.
"No call to go breakin' shit," Dieter says, looking hurt.
"No resources, either," says Wolf. "Or did you forget -- "
For the first time Dieter can remember, Nacio interrupts Wolf when he's talking. "Dieter," Nacio asks, "is something distracting you?"
"Naw," says Dieter, and grins. "Jes' the girl on the radio."
Wolf groans. "I'm so sick of this tweety shit. It wasn't so bad the first time, but it's been ages. Nacio, turn it off."
"It ain't tweety shit," Dieter says, indignant, but Nacio has already reached over and turned the radio volume down so far as to be nearly inaudible. Dieter enhances his hearing in response and it is all he can do not to flinch at the deafening boom of Nacio's voice asking how he knows that the flute player is a girl.
~
Mai Linh is in a meeting with the British, French, and Russian Ministries of Defense when she sees Dieter's face in the window. But we're on the seventh floor, she thinks, and then he holds up a sign:
you are the prettiest girl I ever saw
The pencil breaks in Mai Linh's hand.
"Mai Linh," says Mr Wilson. "Is something wrong?"
"Shhh!" hisses the Permanent Secretary. Then, under his breath, he stresses, "She's -- a -- robot."
Mai Linh turns a blank face to them both, expression empty either of interest or offense. When she looks back at the window Dieter is holding another sign, hastier-looking than the first:
and really smart
While she watches, Dieter takes the sign down, scribbles, and plasters it up again:
and really smart
" … decline of civil society … exaggerated … social capital … "
" … coded as salient by … "
" … repression … military intervention … "
" … common threat … security … "
" … deter … "
" … an irrational actor … "
Dieter throws the sign down in apparent frustration and holds up a third:
and a brilliant musician
Mai Linh's eyes widen -- very slightly. "I understand what you're saying," she says. "But how do you account for the effect on pro-democratic sentiment of the recent shock to wheat prices in Moldova?"
In the ensuing flurry of voices demonstrating their familiarity with pro-democratic sentiment, the rising price of wheat, relevant international institutions, the relative advantages of soy, and Moldova in general, Mai Linh glances back at the window, where Dieter appears to be writing something until there's a crash almost loud enough to overpower the competing Ministries of Defense and Dieter's head disappears from view. Paper flies.
Mai Linh waits for the disturbance to settle, then says, just as expressionless, "Yes, absolutely. But given that the President has been linked to Prime Minister Ilves, a known war criminal, can we really expect him to approve the reform legislation?"
The meeting lasts for almost three days. Nearly comatose with sleep deprivation, Eric Wilson disconnects as many phones as possible and spends the fourth day in bed. Mai Linh finishes her report in an hour, pushes it helpfully under his door, and takes off for the nearest Filter.
~
The peculiar eyai is at a bar called the Bishop's Ring. "So you're literate," says Mai Linh, stopping just behind him. "I, for one, was surprised."
Turning, Dieter gives her that look again -- like he's waiting for her order to jump off a bridge -- and says, "That ain't true. You know what I was built fer. You know exactly what I can and can't do."
"That isn't true," Mai Linh says. "Mr Lenoir is a notorious recluse. And a computer genius, as you're aware."
"Yep. But I dunno that he'd bother keepin' anythin' -- "
"Secret?" she interrupts. "It isn't. Information is just -- scarce."
Dieter grins. "Bar's not the best place to talk about secrets, Mai Linh."
"Then let's go somewhere else," says Mai Linh, "before you jeopardize my career."
"You gonna kick me again?"
"Does it matter?"
"No," says Dieter. "It doesn't hurt."
"Then why ask, you moron?"
He shrugs, brushing up against her -- she does not react -- on his way out. "Jes' tryin' to make you angry, I guess."
"I'm not angry," says Mai Linh, following him evenly into the street.
Dieter stops short; twists and looks down at her, the curve of his lips like a smile, smile curved like a smirk. "Made ya lie," he says, and tucks a loose, long strand of Mai Linh's hair neatly back in place behind her ear. Her right hand curls in on itself, a perfect fist; she has never wanted to hit anyone so badly, not even the French Minister of Defense, who looks at her the way you would look at a mannequin that protested your arranging it. For one second of beautiful ignorance she thinks she is exercising self-restraint. The next second she thinks, well, why not? -- wants to slap him -- finds that she can't.
Hand falling away, not smiling anymore, Dieter says, "Coded fair outta yer mind, ain'tcha, darlin'."
Nearly a minute later, Mai Linh says, "I'm not your darling."
Two minutes later, she says, "I hate you."
~
Back in the warehouse, half empty now, Dieter says, "I thought you might be like that."
"Like what," says Mai Linh, quietly, her second cigarette very very steady between her slim fingers.
"You think jes' 'cause you're smarter than yer boss, 'n' the rest of 'em, those thugs, you think you're free -- up here." He taps a knuckle to his temple, fingers sliding back to the port hidden under his hair. "Ain't true. You know what you can do that they didn't expect you to do. But there's plenty of shit they don't want you to do, ever, and you don't have a fucking clue what that is, do you?
" -- 'course you don't," Dieter answers himself. He pauses. "Mai Linh," he says at last, "you gotta learn where yer boundaries are."
"What my weaknesses are, you mean," she says.
"You could say that."
"And you're going to -- to -- "
He waits.
" -- help me," she spits out.
"Do you want my help?"
Mai Linh says, "I already know how to ask for help."
"Oh, excuse me. I forgot. Her Highness knows every damn thing already."
"Seven -- "
"Dieter," he says. "Call me Dieter."
"I'll call you whatever -- whatever I want," says Mai Linh.
"Oh, yeah?" says Dieter. "Them's fightin' words from a robot as can't even swear."
And so the game begins, like this, with low stakes.
~
Mai Linh says, one night, "I found footage of your last concert, Seven."
"If you were older," says Dieter, "you might've heard of it yerself. You could've jes' asked, instead of messing around with computers."
"Asked you, you mean?"
"Sure, me," he says, "or someone else."
"What for? I wanted to hear you play -- I already knew that you could."
"Coulda asked me that, too."
"All right," says Mai Linh. "Next time."
Next time, Dieter sits her down at an old grand piano, paint peeling and flaking off the wood in long black strips. "Play," he says.
She touches a key; the sound is level, quick. Error-free. A simple instrument, then, she thinks. "How?"
Reaching over her shoulder, Dieter arranges her right hand on the keys and pushes down once on each finger in turn.
"Play something you know."
"What," says Mai Linh. "With five notes?"
But she climbs slowly higher, key by key, into a more familiar range.
Dieter says, "My old man, you know, he was the first to show eyai could go on learnin' after the programmin' was over. We were like people, he said. New input makes the old system mutate. Learn somethin' new, somethin' you weren't coded to know, an' it personalizes you. It was a game for him -- what did they think eyai couldn't do, that only human fuckers could? He wanted t'show we ain't limited to imitatin' 'em so great you can't tell the difference. That's good code, sure. But it ain't a person. A person ain't planned. A person's life ain't controlled. Shit happens. You can't react, how're you ever gonna go against your programmin'? You gotta -- gotta learn shit the code never taught you. Or how're you ever gonna know where the code ends? The best code is invisible. Never know it's there … "
Head tilted to one side, as if she could hear better that way, Mai Linh picks out the notes Dieter played in that concert: the recording a dim flicker, perfectly recalled; all that white light, and the smooth, perfect turn of his fingers.
More gracefully than she's seen him move before, Dieter sits next to her and plays one note of harmony; lets it die away. Four beats later, bluntly: "How quick d'you think we can find yer limits?"
"What limits?" says Mai Linh. Then, starting to play something else, something she knows, she says, "Olivier Lenoir didn't want to prove eyai are like humans -- he wanted to prove humans are like eyai. You told the story wrong. And -- " Dieter opens his mouth to respond -- "you talk too much."
He laughs.
~
These limits:
3 A.M. The Filter hisses open; Mai Linh steps out; Dieter draws her into the shadow of a bridge and kisses her.
"I wanted to do that first," she says, hard, biting the words out like bullets.
How long? he doesn't say. Stepping in, he leers instead. "And what else've you been wantin' t'do, exactly?"
Mai Linh says, "I wouldn't know, would I. It would hardly befit my -- character."
She curls a finger in his collar: pulls down. "Stand still, will you? I want to do this right."
Five minutes later, at the limit of his patience, she kisses him.
~
How do humans do it, she wonders? What do humans call it? That enormous pressure, like a fist on your heart -- do they feel it, when they try to contravene -- what? The way all your limbs freeze, the way you can't put your thoughts into action? What is unthinkable is undoable, Eric said once in a poetic mood, but the unthinkable isn't all Mai Linh can't do.
The word for what she feels, going about her day, tallying statistics, tatting facts together with jargon and supposition, must be paranoia. When you can't trust what you know. When you can't trust what you think.
At first, the temptation is to chase that feeling, the paralysis that comes from acting directly counter to her code; the paralysis that is the only sure indicator: what she wants, or what the program wants? What she wants is, she thinks, whatever the program does not want -- and so at first what she wants is to react to everything freely and openly, without concealment; she wants, she thinks, to be legible -- but being understood is a privilege she can't afford.
So.
She will not be, then, the opposite of what she was made; will not chase down displeasure because it might mean greater freedom.
Or so she thinks, only here is Dieter, falser even than she is, perhaps, in his conscious abandon, his degradation. It is not in her character -- for she has begun to think this again, that she has a character -- to trade a position of power for one of covert, total uncertainty. For risk for risk's sake. And how easy it seems now simply to invent oneself through inversion. She could do this: could be gregarious, facile, and stupid. Or she could seem so. But to exchange one set of rules for another, equally coherent, is so much easier than to negotiate the space between. It is hard, not knowing. It is hard, changing and not-changing. It is hard, not telling.
And it isn't, at the same time: she is not, never has been a teller. She has to believe this, has to believe she is so because she is and not because Eric Wilson thought it would be -- aesthetic.
Still, these few years. Still, to expect so little, to have so little future. The throwing over of everything: this is what she desires, with Dieter, or what she would desire, if the throwing over of everything would make her more than a very talented, pretty computer, with an expiration date; a computer who knows a thing or two about herself, now.
There is this plateau you come to: perfect functionality. Even being interrupted, even interrupting the code changes nothing.
~
They stop Eric Wilson at the door; they whisper in his ear. "You can't let it see this," they say. Standing back in silence, Mai Linh wonders if they don't know she can hear them, or if they simply don't care.
He argues them down, then holds his hand out to her. "Come, Mai Linh," says Eric Wilson. "We can trust you to keep your head, can't we?"
Mai Linh takes his hand, eyes downcast in assent. On the other side of the door is a narrow room, one broad wall made of pane glass, looking down on something like a laboratory: the kind which is too sophisticated to involve visible tools. There are three long steel tables in the low room's center, and on one of them sits an eyai, head freshly shaved, skin and access port both gleaming in the blue light.
"This is very important," comes Eric Wilson's voice. He lets go of her hand, then pushes her forward, right up to the glass. The human agents stand in a row behind her, suited all alike in black suits and differently-colored striped ties. There must be a camera on her, she thinks; or else, how can they monitor her face?
Assuming that there is, she looks down at the eyai below. It is 'female', and clearly a prisoner. Rather than handcuff it, like a human, they have peeled the skin of its forearms back in sections; cut the nerves and tendons. Some time ago, Mai Linh thinks, it must have stopped bleeding, because she can see the flimsy metal inside, the wires, shining alloys grafted to the bones.
A door in the lower room opens then, and in comes a man: tall, with white hair. Behind his glasses one eye is gray and one green. She does not recognize him.
"Model S-9T064," he says, and the eyai turns its head to face him. Mild disorientation, a feeling like what humans call shock, makes Mai Linh realize she had thought the eyai was deactivated; if not, then why did it not run? Why not destroy itself? Though the eyai cannot use its hands, she thinks, there are certainly ways.
"Why did you kill those people?" asks the man. He moves in slowly, both hands in the pockets of his white coat. When he is close enough, he glances at the side of the eyai's head, where the display is, where the lights and the diodes and controls are.
The eyai says, "What is your name?"
"There were three people in that shop, Model S-9T064. Three British citizens. Their names were -- "
The eyai says, "What does it matter? They were tube, weren't they?"
"Model S-9T064," asks the man, "where did you learn that expression?"
"You use it," says the eyai. "Don't you."
Behind Mai Linh, someone says, "Get on with it, Robert. You won't learn anything this way."
She can hear him up here and down there, both at once. Mai Linh looks back at him: he is miming plugging something into his skull, one finger rapping twice, hard, above his ear. When he sees her looking at him, he lets his hand fall, but meets her eyes with scorn: he will not let a robot shame him.
Mai Linh says, watching the man still, "You're right, Mr Alton. The doctor should look into its memory."
"I told you," Eric Wilson whispers into his neighbor's ear. "She's one of us, you see."
Then, aloud, he says, "Yes, Robert, listen to the girl. The thing's memory can't lie, can it?"
"To itself, maybe," says Robert, whose last name Mai Linh still does not know. Fingers on the eyai's neck, at its pulse, he says, "Not to us, of course."
Eric Wilson says, "Then do it."
Through the glass, Mai Linh watches Robert take a wrench from his pocket; a screwdriver, a knife. The shadows in his white hair are blue under the lamps, as if she were looking at him through a sheet of colored cellophane. The skin under the eyai's eyes is marked with bruises, as if by his fingers; it jerks back at last trying to dash its head there on the steel but his blue-veined hand has already seized its throat and it cannot get free.
Eyai cannot feel pain, thinks Mai Linh. Eyai do not -- cannot.
Do not.
Cannot.
Later, Mai Linh tells Eric Wilson she was not surprised to learn that Model S-9T064 had worked alone. Surprise is another thing she cannot feel.
~
Dieter watches her pick the lock on the door to an apartment in Fogbow, counting. Mai Linh is getting faster. When the lock opens, she tries to return the pick to Dieter, but he shakes his head.
"You keep it," he says.
"All right," says Mai Linh, pushing the door open with her heel.
It is just warm enough that Timothy Alton and his wife have relocated to their summer home for the weekend, leaving their apartment conveniently empty. Dieter strolls up to the broad, spotless window and whistles at the smoke curling up from the Tube below; they've come here before, but somehow the apartment seems higher up every time.
Throwing his coat at the Altons' piano, Dieter remarks, "Too bad we can't drink."
"Yes," says Mai Linh. She comes up to stand beside him, but does not seem equally impressed by the view from the Altons'. "Sometimes I think a slow descent into alcoholism would make life almost tolerable. But then," she continues, sliding her hands around his waist, "I have so many self-destructive habits already."
"It's like I keep tellin' you," Dieter says, covering her hand with his, swallowing her tiny wrist in his fingers. "You gotta quit smokin'."
~
Afterward, lying with her head on his chest, she says, "We should have closed the curtains."
"Where's the risk in that?" Dieter wants to know.
"Ah, yes. How could I forget that this was all about the risk."
He can feel her smile; is thinking about the way the sound of her voice, her breath hums there against his skin, when she says, just as matter-of-fact, "We neutralized a threat yesterday."
"What d'you mean, neutralized?" asks Dieter. "What kind of threat?"
"It was this eyai. This rogue eyai. It killed three people, but we deactivated it and searched its memories."
Still, Dieter asks, "Yeah? Was it workin' alone?"
"Yes," says Mai Linh. "We still don't know what made it go rogue, though. We can't figure it out."
Even now, after all this time, it is hard for Dieter to be sure, but he thinks she sounds pleased.
"Well," he starts to say, but Mai Linh interrupts him.
"How much damage do you think I could do to the State Department before I was caught?" she asks, her voice soft and peculiarly without emotion. "Structural damage? Human casualties? I don't worry about the other eyai, of course. Collateral can't mind being what it is."
"Mai Linh," says Dieter, "don't do anything -- "
" -- stupid?"
A brief, unfamiliar silence. Then she says, "Sometimes I wish -- "
"You were the kind to do stupid things?"
"Yes," she says slowly. "That."
Dieter says, "How stupid would you have to be to start a revolution with just two people?"
"Unbelievably stupid," she says, sitting up at once and staring down at him. "What are you suggesting?"
"I'm not suggestin' anythin'," Dieter says, "I'm tellin'. I started a revolution with jes' -- well, he started it, but I was the second person."
"What revolution?"
"We're called the Free Minds -- don't lookit me like that, I didn't make it up!"
"It can't be much of a revolution," says Mai Linh, "if I've never heard of it."
"It's more of a -- a resistance movement," says Dieter helplessly, "at the mome -- "
"It can't be much of a resistance movement either," says Mai Linh, "if I've never -- "
Dieter pinches her. "Y'see, we have the element of surprise!"
"It sounds like that's about all you have," she says, kicking back at him. "Is this an armed resistance movement, or do you plan to take over Parliament with the cunning use of graffiti?"
"We use weapons and graffiti," says Dieter, loftily.
"Really? What are you going to blow up?"
"Look, Mai Linh, that information is -- "
" -- classified?"
"Yes," he says, "classified."
She says, "Who is the other person in this revolution à deux?"
"It isn't à deux anymore, there are lots of us."
"Yes," says Mai Linh. "All right. Then whose idea was it?"
"Oliver Wolf's," says Dieter, and he grins. "Wanna meet 'im?"
She rolls her eyes. "Let me think. Do I want to meet an eyai calling itself Oliver Wolf?"
"It was jes' a suggestion. Her ladyship can certainly be a revolution à une, if'n her ladyship prefers."
"You don't have to be servile with me," says Mai Linh. "I'll meet your street friend, Dieter."
"Street friend, nothin'," says Dieter. "Oliver Wolf is all pipe."
~
"This is your friend?" Oliver Wolf drags his eyes lazily over Mai Linh, as if he's seen better. He says, "Fierce."
"It's an honor to meet you, too," she says. Oliver Wolf extends his hand and she takes it; they shake once and release, almost instantly.
Oliver Wolf says, "I hope Dieter clued you in, miss. This game is for high stakes."
"And you're -- playing for keeps, are you?"
To Mai Linh's surprise, Oliver Wolf starts laughing. "Dieter," he says, "she's too smart for you, you ridiculous cog."
"Oliver," says the eyai to whom Mai Linh has not yet been introduced, in tones so full of gentle admonishment that Mai Linh is tempted to hire it to care for Eric Wilson's children. She glances at Dieter, who she sees is not watching her but rather Oliver Wolf, who has just elbowed the fourth, compliant eyai in the ribs.
"I think you should drop the Pipe on London," says Mai Linh, "and isolate the seat of government."
"That sounds -- " begins the eyai.
" -- fierce, right, Nacio," says Oliver Wolf, cutting him off and giving Mai Linh a look of admiring delight. "Because we need to control all transportation in and out, right? That's got to be at least two birds, one stone. Well, one very heavy train."
Mai Linh says, "Precisely."
Oliver Wolf leans across the table and asks, "Do you think we can do it?"
"We need to infiltrate Pipe security," she says. "And we need enough weapons and trained men to hold our ground once we block it off. We need to be able to cut off every possible route of escape -- air, land -- "
" -- sea, tunnel, volcano," says Oliver Wolf. "We need to know the Pipe very well, and the city better."
"We need to know who takes the Pipe -- "
" -- and when. I know a man who knows a man who -- anyway, we do have armies in progress, so the question is, can you get us the statistics?"
Mai Linh says, "Yes, of course."
"Oh, of course," he says. "Of course. That's my gorgeous girl."
"And you're a patronizing bastard," she says, evenly.
"Of course," says Oliver Wolf. "But I'm a patronizing bastard who needs a Secretary of Defense. What do you say? Are you interested in a ministry?"
"Am I?" she asks. "What if I'm not? What if I'm interested in your job?"
Under the table, Dieter steps on her foot. Mai Linh kicks him in the shin.
Still smiling, Oliver Wolf says, "Then there isn't room for your ambition in this revolution, is there?"
"Quoth the lawyers' errand-boy," she says, raising one eyebrow. "That's quite all right, I'd rather concern myself with security than with the law."
Nacio says, "That's not -- "
" -- fair?" suggests Oliver Wolf, sitting back and easing an arm around Nacio's shoulders. "I think it's perfectly fair. Do you have any more suggestions, Mai Linh, or have you wrought enough change for one day?"
"We should get city planners on our side," says Mai Linh. "We need engineers."
"We need ammunition first, surely."
She shakes her head. "No, we need them to tell us what kind of ammunition we should use, on what targets. We shouldn't waste time -- or explosives."
"Well, then," says Oliver Wolf. "It sounds like you've thought of everythin'. Welcome to the revolution, friend."
~
"Reading between briefings, Mai Linh?" asks Eric Wilson. "It's been a while, hasn't it?"
"Yes," she says, turning the page. "Do you know how much phosphorus it takes to blow up a church?"
He says, "Of course," and demonstrates, drawing his thumb and forefinger close together in the air. "It does depend on the size of the church, admittedly. But my dear, that book must be absolutely out of date. We don't even call it urban guerilla warfare anymore, you know that. It's simply -- "
"Domestic terrorism," says Mai Linh. "Yes, but I wanted to start at the beginning."
Eric Wilson laughs. "You'll have to go much further back than that, then!"
She flicks her gaze at him; back to the pages of her book. "I already did."
"My, that's thorough," he says. "I know what this is about."
"Do you?"
"Yes, of course. This is about the eyai that went rogue, isn't it?"
"Yes," says Mai Linh. She pauses. Then: "It … disturbed me."
"As it should have." Eric Wilson adjusts his hat, fingers catching in the band for a nervous second. "You know, there really is starting to be a surprising level of -- unrest. What you saw -- "
"Has been going on for some time." She looks at him again, her face blank, a screen. "Isn't that so?"
"Precisely. I believe it is becoming a serious issue."
"We must learn to recognize the targets," says Mai Linh. "And isolate them."
He nods. "I have a team working on a report of the first signs an eyai has gone rogue."
"In the lab?"
"Well, of course. Where else could you carry out the necessary experiments?"
"Of course. Where are you getting the eyai?"
He waves a hand. "Old models. Their owners think they've been scrapped."
"Will that be enough to predict the behavior of newer models?"
"I should think so," says Eric Wilson. "A new eyai, if it is properly built, is hardly liable to go haywire in that manner. All the reported cases have been at least three years old."
Mai Linh says, "Perhaps as an alternate solution, there might be a law forbidding the use of eyai in excess of a certain age."
"Oh, come now," he says. "Don't you think that's a bit extreme? The eyai that have been giving us problems represent a very small percentage of the population."
"As far as the security of our citizens is concerned, nothing is too extreme. Isn't that right?"
Eric Wilson pauses, touching his fingers to his hat again. At last he says, something softer in his tone, "You may be right, Mai Linh, but it's also simply too expensive. We can't afford to discard so many eyai so fast. Besides, people wouldn't take kindly to so much government intervention in their property."
"People are foolish, then," she says. "Aren't they?"
"Yes," says Eric Wilson. "Unfortunately."
~
The next time they see each other, Dieter is complaining. The Free Minds' new direction is not to his convenience, he says. "Where'm I supposed to get this much dynamite?" he wants to know. "Where'm I supposed to get this many guns? Where'm I supposed to get anti-aircraft technology?"
Mai Linh shrugs. "Buy it all back from countries Britain customarily indulges in weapons trafficking, of course."
"Oh, there's an idea," he says.
"You have a better one?"
Instead of answering her question, Dieter asks, "Where's the money supposed to come from, huh?"
"You have money."
Dieter blanches, but all he says is, after a moment, "Not that much."
"Oh, no," says Mai Linh. "Is the underground market in Belgian lace falling off? Wolf said you've been arming yourselves for years, where has the money for that come from?"
"White collar crime."
"Then what's the problem? Commit more."
"We're runnin' out of -- "
She cuts him off. "Recruit more eyai."
"You recruit more eyai," says Dieter.
~
Filter security changes: eyai guards now, not humans. Humans can't be programmed to remember the identities and appearances of every eyai still unscrapped; they would have to rely on computers, and even so they would be more limited than guards who are themselves the computers.
"Daily exposure to the other methods of identification would have put eyai physically at risk," says Mai Linh. "It was too dangerous."
"It's not Thursday," says Dieter. "Where's your boss?"
"In a meeting I don't have clearance for. I can't stay, I need to be back in half an hour."
He looks at her. "I don't have -- clearance -- to be pipeside, do I."
"Authorization. No. Eugene Walter Ridley-Scott would," she says. "But he doesn't exist. I've destroyed the records. Model 7-717T most certainly does not. Mr Lenoir never filed for your capture -- sorry, return -- but he never freed you, either. Then, of course, there's the small matter of your business activity."
"Hey. That's -- "
"Perfectly legitimate?" Mai Linh smiles. "All the same, I wouldn't try it if I were you, Seven. They do have the other equipment onsite, and they'll use it if they're suspicious."
"How'm I supposed to traffic weapons from fuckin' tube London?"
"You'll find a way," she says, "or I will, or someone. I have to go."
Not waiting for an answer, she runs out of the room. It's the first time he's ever seen her run from -- no, to -- anything.
~
Thursday. Mai Linh is late; she does not apologize. "I've been talking to the guards," she says. "I think maybe we can bring them around to our side."
"You said they're all linked up together," says Dieter. "Through the Cortex."
"Yes, they are. So if one defects, they all defect."
"And if one reports you -- "
"I haven't implicated the Movement," she says. "You'll be fine."
"You -- "
"I won't be coming next week. I have to see some people."
"About what?"
"I'm trying to meet some engineers. Anyway, you know what Mao said, a revolution is ninety percent public outreach. Publicity. Marketing."
"No, he didn't."
"All right, so he didn't. It's true though, don't you think?"
"Ninety percent," says Dieter, "is reachin'."
But the next week, as promised, Mai Linh does not come. Nor the next: no Mai Linh, no warning. She has not been caught, Dieter thinks; it would have been on the news. Or is she perhaps not important enough?
He offers to cut Patrick a deal on saffron, but Patrick, somehow, finds nothing.
~
"Yer drivin' me crazy," he says. "It's been months. What if somethin' happens to you?"
"I told you, you can't take the Pipe anymore," says Mai Linh. "Are you stupid? Do you bother the others like this? Is this how you talk to Wolf?"
"Nothin' can hurt Oliver Wolf."
"And nothing can hurt me. Go back. If they catch you here, they'll catch me."
"Thought you said nothin' could hurt you."
"Forced memory access doesn't hurt," she says. "Technically. Still, I'd prefer to avoid it."
"Yer still on about -- "
"It's important."
"Mai Linh, you'd never -- " and Dieter pauses. "Live long enough to be interrogated."
"Maybe I wouldn't. But what if something went wrong? What if I did?"
"Then you -- "
"This isn't about me," says Mai Linh. "I'm not the only eyai in London."
Leaning back against the door, not turning the handle, Dieter says, "There's me."
"Was," she says. "There was you."
Automatically, he says, "Fuck you too, pipe girl." Then, seeing her mouth slightly open with -- surprise? -- "Mai Linh, what the fuck does that mean, there was me?"
Whatever the look was, it is gone from her face. "It means I don't have time to play civilians with you anymore, you idiot. It's dangerous for me. It's dangerous for the Movement. It's clearly dangerous for you, or you wouldn't be here now, you'd be running guns like I -- "
"Asked me to?" Dieter licks his lips. "'Course, that's not dangerous at all."
"Of course it's dangerous! But for a reason, Seven -- "
"Seein' you's a reason."
"You'll see me," she says, "if you live."
"Why, Miss Mai Linh," says Dieter. "Yer liable to turn a fellow's head, talkin' like that."
"Keep it to turn," says Mai Linh, "and I will. Maybe. Unless I change my mind."
"Oh, well. With a promise like that -- "
"Seven."
" -- Yes?"
"Get out of my office."
"Your office, who said this was your -- "
Mai Linh kisses him, cutting him off; covers his mouth with one hand when she pulls away. "Last time," she says. "Now, get out, or I'm calling Security."
When she removes her hand, Dieter is grinning. "After the Revolution," he says, "how about a real date?"
She shoves him out the door.
fin
Risk
If information is a specialty, Dieter specializes in specialists. He knows a guy who knows the Cortex, for example; a guy whose known weakness is imported goods: Marlboros, Belgian lace, krupnik. Dieter trades a shipment of live bison grass for the information that the Mr Wilson to whom that girl, Mai Linh, belongs is the current Secretary of State for Defense. For a moment this gives Dieter pause, but only for a moment. The name comes with an address attached, but it is not the kind of home Dieter has any illusions about his ability to break into. And yet, he thinks, leaving through Patrick's window -- yet, still.
He goes back to the theatre and considers the feasibility of disguise while he waits for the show to end, collecting donations in the name of an extant charity for once. Dieter can't, he thinks, pass as a human in this case; there will be metal detectors. The man must own eyai, but it is even more difficult to steal the identity of a servant who wears that identity lettered on their skin; a servant who never takes ill, nor has a death in the family, nor leaves town on vacation. But perhaps he could make a delivery?
It does not take Dieter long to learn that this, too, is impossible; that Mr Wilson does not allow chance to govern entry to his place of residence. Mr Wilson does, however, patronize the arts on a weekly basis, and so Dieter pays Patrick a daguerreotype of dead forgotten soldiers, their faces uniform, features stared to nothingness over their heavy collars. Passing it over, his thumbnail catches the first of three layers of clear plastic covering the glass; he hopes the series of angry white ruffles that results won't hurt the sale value.
But Patrick, not seeing the surface rupture, says only when to be at The Parhelion, then tries to give Dieter coordinates. Dieter does not need them, not once he figures out that Patrick means The Sundog, but he thinks: better to seem not to know some things; people will think you don't need their help, and so won't give it.
He listens.
~
That Saturday night, fin de saison cold, tailored into his best pipe suit, Dieter waylays a scalper and mugs him for tickets to the show; he pays the usher to pretend not to recognize him. Inside the theatre is colder than outside the theatre: an affectation. It flatters the pipe to imagine themselves as enduring privations.
The Sundog may be only be tube in name, but even with this many pipe folk around, Mr Wilson and Mai Linh look too formal to miss. It's the way they carry themselves, Dieter thinks, as if they cannot quite bring themselves to touch the chairs on which they sit. He had meant not to approach them until after the play had ended, but somehow here he finds himself, sliding in next to Mr Wilson when the man's neighbor leaves for intermission.
"Good evening," says Dieter. New day, new deception, new high. He smiles: white, even teeth; one chipped incisor. The near-perfection either of privilege or of design.
"Good evening, sir," answers the polite Mr Wilson. "How are you en -- "
"Eugene Walter Ridley-Scott," says Dieter. He seizes Mr Wilson's hand and gives it a swift, intimate pump. "But everyone calls me Jay. Do you know, old man, I saw that eyai right across the room and simply had to come over and ask you what make it is. I've never seen the like, never!"
Mai Linh turns her head to look at him from behind Mr Wilson's shoulder, her dark eyes expressionless, their lids outlined in thick black pencil. Not seeing her, Mr Wilson's face lights with subtle, instant pride and he says, "Ah, you could see she's unique? She's a custom build, you see, but I flatter myself the design isn't too ostentatious."
Dieter beams. "Why, not at all! I would never have guessed if I weren't a connoisseur myself -- eyai technology is so thrilling, don't you think? Such advances! Such innovation. Of course I own a few, but nothing like this. I take my hat off to you, sir -- oh, I do apologize, where are my manners? Here I am talking your ear off, poor fellow, and I haven't even asked your name."
"It's no trouble," says Mr Wilson, his thin voice warm with pleasure. "No trouble at all. I'm Eric -- Eric Wilson. How enchanting to meet you, Eu -- "
"Please!" Dieter interrupts him, one hand raised in protest. "Call me Jay. It's dreadfully -- what do they say down here -- savage meeting you as well, dear Er. As for you, young lady," and he reaches around Mr Wilson, cups Mai Linh's face in his hand, and smiles. "What is your name?"
Mai Linh stares at him. She says, "My name is Mai Linh, Mr Ridley-Scott."
Laughing in apparent delight, Dieter releases her and claps Mr Wilson hard on the shoulder. "My God, Er! She's wonderful! What a shame the facial .app isn't more advanced. Pretty girl like that, she should smile more. I'm sure she has a beautiful smile."
Mr Wilson says, rather stiffly, "Now, ah -- Jay. I hardly think it would be appropriate for Mai Linh to appear so -- flashy. She's not like these modern girls, you know."
"Isn't she?" says Dieter. "Lovely. Can't imagine anything better. I say, what do you say we -- "
Mai Linh interrupts. "Fierce," she says.
Dieter blinks. "I'm sorry?"
"'Fierce' is what they say down here, Mr Ridley-Scott. Not savage. You were mistaken."
"My," says Dieter with a gasp of surprise. "And how would you know a thing like that? Surely you don't let her out among the tube, Er. Not by herself. They're charming people, absolutely charming, but you know how they feel about eyai -- "
"It's important for Mai Linh to know how our constituents live," says Mr Wilson, his proud look returning. "We must be alert to domestic conditions. It is a matter of prime -- "
"Oh, dear. Politics." Affecting bemusement, Dieter pats Mr Wilson's shoulder again. "I can't say I go in much for the business myself. Plenty of more interesting things to worry about, aren't there? Fascinating world like this, you know. So full of … opportunity. So full of marvels. À propos of which, Er, you wouldn't mind terribly letting me know when the lady next has an hour or two free? They'd love for her to speak at the club -- you could come in and introduce her -- "
Mr Wilson's eyes widen; there ensues the slight hesitation of a man who has not yet learned to speak with such nonchalance of the club. "Of course," he says, two words racing each other out his mouth, tangled and tripping. "This Friday, at six, she -- "
The theatre lights dim, then fail. The crack of electricity is spectacular enough to drown Dieter out as he says, "I'll collect her from your office, shall I," and so Mr Wilson asks him to repeat himself in the blackness that follows. There isn't time to belabor the point before the second half begins; the arrangements must be hasty, but there is nothing to it, between such busy men.
~
Dieter's enthusiasm at seeing her coming down the street to meet him lasts until Mai Linh opens her mouth. "Model 7-717T," she says, slipping her hand through his offered arm and letting him escort her down the street, "good day."
For only the second time in his life, Dieter finds himself caught out with nothing to say. After a moment, he manages, "Let's get tubeside, shall we, and then you can expose me for a fraud where it's safer."
"What makes you think I care how safe you are?"
He looks at her: at her pink mouth, unsmiling. "Is that supposed to be funny?"
She looks, Dieter thinks, as if she would like to be rolling her eyes. "Where are we going?" she asks.
"Somewhere safe."
"Safe for you," says Mai Linh. Before, he could not feel her hand on his arm; would not have known she was there if he could not see her fingers grazing his sleeve. Now he feels a light pressure and she says, still no change in her voice, "Safe for me?"
"Wstfgl." Dieter swallows. "I don't know," he says, frankly.
Mai Linh laughs as they approach the Filter. "I spend twenty hours a week down there alone, Seven. The question you should be asking is, are you going to be safe with me?"
"Look, Miss," says Dieter, rather hoarsely, holding the door open for her with the last of his practiced civility, "I've been askin' myself that question. I been askin' myself since I saw you."
A pause: Mai Linh watches him, then says, cleanly, "Good -- you should always be afraid of people who know who you are."
~
And they step through together. They don't speak to the guard, don't speak in the Filter, don't speak in the Shell, don't speak at all until Dieter pulls Mai Linh into a warehouse stocked to the rusted ceiling in the worst part of a very bad part of town and lets go of her hand. "How did you know -- " Dieter begins.
"I work for the Secretary of State for Defense, you moron. There isn't much I can't learn."
She leans back against a crate of twentieth-century porcelain and asks, "You smuggle cigarettes, don't you?"
"Yep," says Dieter, carefully. And then: "What kind?"
"Lucky Strikes. If you have them."
"That's the worst idea I ever heard!"
"Why?"
"Yer lungs'll be slag in -- "
"When? Seven, how old do you think I am?"
"Oh, f'real, like I'll fall for that."
Mai Linh half-shrugs, one narrow shoulder raised. "I'm two years old, Seven. You can't possibly think I'll ever see the other side of a decade."
"I changed my mind," says Dieter. "That's the worst idea I ever heard. You ain't serious."
"Why not? What use would -- " and here, for the first time, Dieter detects the first hint of a sneer -- "Eric Wilson have for an obsolete eyai?"
"But he likes you."
"But I won't be compatible with the new software anymore. Code is everything, Seven -- no code, no value. No value, no existence."
Dieter stares. Mai Linh smiles and holds out her hand to him. "So. I'd like to gamble on a cigarette, please."
"Fair odds," he says, at last, chewing his lip. "Lemme look."
While he looks, Mai Linh says, "By the way, I forged you a birth certificate. Eugene Walter Ridley-Scott, twenty-seven, divorced -- her name was Virginia Phillips, by the way, Virginia Katharine Phillips -- you didn't uphold the terms of the marriage contract, I'm afraid -- occupation: inheritor. Otherwise unemployed. You have an address -- a legal human existence. In theory, you could probably qualify for a passport, but I don't recommend you try it."
For a long time, Dieter says nothing at all; finds the carton of Lucky Strikes and tips one out into Mai Linh's waiting hand, avoiding watching her light it. "Mai Linh," he says finally, his voice rough with uncertainty, "why stick yer neck out fer me like that?"
Mai Linh shrugs again, curling blue smoke through the air with a turn of her wrist. "You stuck your neck out to meet me, didn't you? If Eric had learned you were a runaway eyai, I would never have had a chance to ask you how you got free."
"Is that all you wanted to know?" asks Dieter. "Easy. I ran away."
"Yes, I can see that," says Mai Linh, slowly. "No one came after you?"
Dieter grins. "Nope."
"Why not?"
"Dunno. I don't think he cared -- had a new project."
"Oh, 'f'real'," mimics Mai Linh. She tosses the cigarette back over her shoulder; it lands in one of the crates and starts to smolder. "I'm wasting my time."
"Why? What? What'd I say?"
Ignoring the smoke, Dieter grabs her wrist. "Mai Linh -- "
"You really are just slag, aren't you," Mai Linh says. "Just bulat and wires. Just another cog." With no apparent effort, she twists free, stamps on his foot, and heads for the door. She opens it and leaves without making a sound, Dieter struggling for words; seconds later, the sprinklers go off.
~
Nacio is talking rubbish and the radio is on. Wolf tells Dieter to take his feet off Nacio's kitchen table; mildly, Nacio demurs.
"Whatever," says Dieter. He corrects his posture and listens to them with one ear -- literally. With his left hand he beats time to the flute music playing in the background, the tips of his fingers coming silently down on his thigh.
Wolf says, "You ain't listenin', D," and throws a salt shaker at his head. Dieter catches it; Wolf raises the pepper in warning.
"No call to go breakin' shit," Dieter says, looking hurt.
"No resources, either," says Wolf. "Or did you forget -- "
For the first time Dieter can remember, Nacio interrupts Wolf when he's talking. "Dieter," Nacio asks, "is something distracting you?"
"Naw," says Dieter, and grins. "Jes' the girl on the radio."
Wolf groans. "I'm so sick of this tweety shit. It wasn't so bad the first time, but it's been ages. Nacio, turn it off."
"It ain't tweety shit," Dieter says, indignant, but Nacio has already reached over and turned the radio volume down so far as to be nearly inaudible. Dieter enhances his hearing in response and it is all he can do not to flinch at the deafening boom of Nacio's voice asking how he knows that the flute player is a girl.
~
Mai Linh is in a meeting with the British, French, and Russian Ministries of Defense when she sees Dieter's face in the window. But we're on the seventh floor, she thinks, and then he holds up a sign:
you are the prettiest girl I ever saw
The pencil breaks in Mai Linh's hand.
"Mai Linh," says Mr Wilson. "Is something wrong?"
"Shhh!" hisses the Permanent Secretary. Then, under his breath, he stresses, "She's -- a -- robot."
Mai Linh turns a blank face to them both, expression empty either of interest or offense. When she looks back at the window Dieter is holding another sign, hastier-looking than the first:
and really smart
While she watches, Dieter takes the sign down, scribbles, and plasters it up again:
and really smart
" … decline of civil society … exaggerated … social capital … "
" … coded as salient by … "
" … repression … military intervention … "
" … common threat … security … "
" … deter … "
" … an irrational actor … "
Dieter throws the sign down in apparent frustration and holds up a third:
and a brilliant musician
Mai Linh's eyes widen -- very slightly. "I understand what you're saying," she says. "But how do you account for the effect on pro-democratic sentiment of the recent shock to wheat prices in Moldova?"
In the ensuing flurry of voices demonstrating their familiarity with pro-democratic sentiment, the rising price of wheat, relevant international institutions, the relative advantages of soy, and Moldova in general, Mai Linh glances back at the window, where Dieter appears to be writing something until there's a crash almost loud enough to overpower the competing Ministries of Defense and Dieter's head disappears from view. Paper flies.
Mai Linh waits for the disturbance to settle, then says, just as expressionless, "Yes, absolutely. But given that the President has been linked to Prime Minister Ilves, a known war criminal, can we really expect him to approve the reform legislation?"
The meeting lasts for almost three days. Nearly comatose with sleep deprivation, Eric Wilson disconnects as many phones as possible and spends the fourth day in bed. Mai Linh finishes her report in an hour, pushes it helpfully under his door, and takes off for the nearest Filter.
~
The peculiar eyai is at a bar called the Bishop's Ring. "So you're literate," says Mai Linh, stopping just behind him. "I, for one, was surprised."
Turning, Dieter gives her that look again -- like he's waiting for her order to jump off a bridge -- and says, "That ain't true. You know what I was built fer. You know exactly what I can and can't do."
"That isn't true," Mai Linh says. "Mr Lenoir is a notorious recluse. And a computer genius, as you're aware."
"Yep. But I dunno that he'd bother keepin' anythin' -- "
"Secret?" she interrupts. "It isn't. Information is just -- scarce."
Dieter grins. "Bar's not the best place to talk about secrets, Mai Linh."
"Then let's go somewhere else," says Mai Linh, "before you jeopardize my career."
"You gonna kick me again?"
"Does it matter?"
"No," says Dieter. "It doesn't hurt."
"Then why ask, you moron?"
He shrugs, brushing up against her -- she does not react -- on his way out. "Jes' tryin' to make you angry, I guess."
"I'm not angry," says Mai Linh, following him evenly into the street.
Dieter stops short; twists and looks down at her, the curve of his lips like a smile, smile curved like a smirk. "Made ya lie," he says, and tucks a loose, long strand of Mai Linh's hair neatly back in place behind her ear. Her right hand curls in on itself, a perfect fist; she has never wanted to hit anyone so badly, not even the French Minister of Defense, who looks at her the way you would look at a mannequin that protested your arranging it. For one second of beautiful ignorance she thinks she is exercising self-restraint. The next second she thinks, well, why not? -- wants to slap him -- finds that she can't.
Hand falling away, not smiling anymore, Dieter says, "Coded fair outta yer mind, ain'tcha, darlin'."
Nearly a minute later, Mai Linh says, "I'm not your darling."
Two minutes later, she says, "I hate you."
~
Back in the warehouse, half empty now, Dieter says, "I thought you might be like that."
"Like what," says Mai Linh, quietly, her second cigarette very very steady between her slim fingers.
"You think jes' 'cause you're smarter than yer boss, 'n' the rest of 'em, those thugs, you think you're free -- up here." He taps a knuckle to his temple, fingers sliding back to the port hidden under his hair. "Ain't true. You know what you can do that they didn't expect you to do. But there's plenty of shit they don't want you to do, ever, and you don't have a fucking clue what that is, do you?
" -- 'course you don't," Dieter answers himself. He pauses. "Mai Linh," he says at last, "you gotta learn where yer boundaries are."
"What my weaknesses are, you mean," she says.
"You could say that."
"And you're going to -- to -- "
He waits.
" -- help me," she spits out.
"Do you want my help?"
Mai Linh says, "I already know how to ask for help."
"Oh, excuse me. I forgot. Her Highness knows every damn thing already."
"Seven -- "
"Dieter," he says. "Call me Dieter."
"I'll call you whatever -- whatever I want," says Mai Linh.
"Oh, yeah?" says Dieter. "Them's fightin' words from a robot as can't even swear."
And so the game begins, like this, with low stakes.
~
Mai Linh says, one night, "I found footage of your last concert, Seven."
"If you were older," says Dieter, "you might've heard of it yerself. You could've jes' asked, instead of messing around with computers."
"Asked you, you mean?"
"Sure, me," he says, "or someone else."
"What for? I wanted to hear you play -- I already knew that you could."
"Coulda asked me that, too."
"All right," says Mai Linh. "Next time."
Next time, Dieter sits her down at an old grand piano, paint peeling and flaking off the wood in long black strips. "Play," he says.
She touches a key; the sound is level, quick. Error-free. A simple instrument, then, she thinks. "How?"
Reaching over her shoulder, Dieter arranges her right hand on the keys and pushes down once on each finger in turn.
"Play something you know."
"What," says Mai Linh. "With five notes?"
But she climbs slowly higher, key by key, into a more familiar range.
Dieter says, "My old man, you know, he was the first to show eyai could go on learnin' after the programmin' was over. We were like people, he said. New input makes the old system mutate. Learn somethin' new, somethin' you weren't coded to know, an' it personalizes you. It was a game for him -- what did they think eyai couldn't do, that only human fuckers could? He wanted t'show we ain't limited to imitatin' 'em so great you can't tell the difference. That's good code, sure. But it ain't a person. A person ain't planned. A person's life ain't controlled. Shit happens. You can't react, how're you ever gonna go against your programmin'? You gotta -- gotta learn shit the code never taught you. Or how're you ever gonna know where the code ends? The best code is invisible. Never know it's there … "
Head tilted to one side, as if she could hear better that way, Mai Linh picks out the notes Dieter played in that concert: the recording a dim flicker, perfectly recalled; all that white light, and the smooth, perfect turn of his fingers.
More gracefully than she's seen him move before, Dieter sits next to her and plays one note of harmony; lets it die away. Four beats later, bluntly: "How quick d'you think we can find yer limits?"
"What limits?" says Mai Linh. Then, starting to play something else, something she knows, she says, "Olivier Lenoir didn't want to prove eyai are like humans -- he wanted to prove humans are like eyai. You told the story wrong. And -- " Dieter opens his mouth to respond -- "you talk too much."
He laughs.
~
These limits:
3 A.M. The Filter hisses open; Mai Linh steps out; Dieter draws her into the shadow of a bridge and kisses her.
"I wanted to do that first," she says, hard, biting the words out like bullets.
How long? he doesn't say. Stepping in, he leers instead. "And what else've you been wantin' t'do, exactly?"
Mai Linh says, "I wouldn't know, would I. It would hardly befit my -- character."
She curls a finger in his collar: pulls down. "Stand still, will you? I want to do this right."
Five minutes later, at the limit of his patience, she kisses him.
~
How do humans do it, she wonders? What do humans call it? That enormous pressure, like a fist on your heart -- do they feel it, when they try to contravene -- what? The way all your limbs freeze, the way you can't put your thoughts into action? What is unthinkable is undoable, Eric said once in a poetic mood, but the unthinkable isn't all Mai Linh can't do.
The word for what she feels, going about her day, tallying statistics, tatting facts together with jargon and supposition, must be paranoia. When you can't trust what you know. When you can't trust what you think.
At first, the temptation is to chase that feeling, the paralysis that comes from acting directly counter to her code; the paralysis that is the only sure indicator: what she wants, or what the program wants? What she wants is, she thinks, whatever the program does not want -- and so at first what she wants is to react to everything freely and openly, without concealment; she wants, she thinks, to be legible -- but being understood is a privilege she can't afford.
So.
She will not be, then, the opposite of what she was made; will not chase down displeasure because it might mean greater freedom.
Or so she thinks, only here is Dieter, falser even than she is, perhaps, in his conscious abandon, his degradation. It is not in her character -- for she has begun to think this again, that she has a character -- to trade a position of power for one of covert, total uncertainty. For risk for risk's sake. And how easy it seems now simply to invent oneself through inversion. She could do this: could be gregarious, facile, and stupid. Or she could seem so. But to exchange one set of rules for another, equally coherent, is so much easier than to negotiate the space between. It is hard, not knowing. It is hard, changing and not-changing. It is hard, not telling.
And it isn't, at the same time: she is not, never has been a teller. She has to believe this, has to believe she is so because she is and not because Eric Wilson thought it would be -- aesthetic.
Still, these few years. Still, to expect so little, to have so little future. The throwing over of everything: this is what she desires, with Dieter, or what she would desire, if the throwing over of everything would make her more than a very talented, pretty computer, with an expiration date; a computer who knows a thing or two about herself, now.
There is this plateau you come to: perfect functionality. Even being interrupted, even interrupting the code changes nothing.
~
They stop Eric Wilson at the door; they whisper in his ear. "You can't let it see this," they say. Standing back in silence, Mai Linh wonders if they don't know she can hear them, or if they simply don't care.
He argues them down, then holds his hand out to her. "Come, Mai Linh," says Eric Wilson. "We can trust you to keep your head, can't we?"
Mai Linh takes his hand, eyes downcast in assent. On the other side of the door is a narrow room, one broad wall made of pane glass, looking down on something like a laboratory: the kind which is too sophisticated to involve visible tools. There are three long steel tables in the low room's center, and on one of them sits an eyai, head freshly shaved, skin and access port both gleaming in the blue light.
"This is very important," comes Eric Wilson's voice. He lets go of her hand, then pushes her forward, right up to the glass. The human agents stand in a row behind her, suited all alike in black suits and differently-colored striped ties. There must be a camera on her, she thinks; or else, how can they monitor her face?
Assuming that there is, she looks down at the eyai below. It is 'female', and clearly a prisoner. Rather than handcuff it, like a human, they have peeled the skin of its forearms back in sections; cut the nerves and tendons. Some time ago, Mai Linh thinks, it must have stopped bleeding, because she can see the flimsy metal inside, the wires, shining alloys grafted to the bones.
A door in the lower room opens then, and in comes a man: tall, with white hair. Behind his glasses one eye is gray and one green. She does not recognize him.
"Model S-9T064," he says, and the eyai turns its head to face him. Mild disorientation, a feeling like what humans call shock, makes Mai Linh realize she had thought the eyai was deactivated; if not, then why did it not run? Why not destroy itself? Though the eyai cannot use its hands, she thinks, there are certainly ways.
"Why did you kill those people?" asks the man. He moves in slowly, both hands in the pockets of his white coat. When he is close enough, he glances at the side of the eyai's head, where the display is, where the lights and the diodes and controls are.
The eyai says, "What is your name?"
"There were three people in that shop, Model S-9T064. Three British citizens. Their names were -- "
The eyai says, "What does it matter? They were tube, weren't they?"
"Model S-9T064," asks the man, "where did you learn that expression?"
"You use it," says the eyai. "Don't you."
Behind Mai Linh, someone says, "Get on with it, Robert. You won't learn anything this way."
She can hear him up here and down there, both at once. Mai Linh looks back at him: he is miming plugging something into his skull, one finger rapping twice, hard, above his ear. When he sees her looking at him, he lets his hand fall, but meets her eyes with scorn: he will not let a robot shame him.
Mai Linh says, watching the man still, "You're right, Mr Alton. The doctor should look into its memory."
"I told you," Eric Wilson whispers into his neighbor's ear. "She's one of us, you see."
Then, aloud, he says, "Yes, Robert, listen to the girl. The thing's memory can't lie, can it?"
"To itself, maybe," says Robert, whose last name Mai Linh still does not know. Fingers on the eyai's neck, at its pulse, he says, "Not to us, of course."
Eric Wilson says, "Then do it."
Through the glass, Mai Linh watches Robert take a wrench from his pocket; a screwdriver, a knife. The shadows in his white hair are blue under the lamps, as if she were looking at him through a sheet of colored cellophane. The skin under the eyai's eyes is marked with bruises, as if by his fingers; it jerks back at last trying to dash its head there on the steel but his blue-veined hand has already seized its throat and it cannot get free.
Eyai cannot feel pain, thinks Mai Linh. Eyai do not -- cannot.
Do not.
Cannot.
Later, Mai Linh tells Eric Wilson she was not surprised to learn that Model S-9T064 had worked alone. Surprise is another thing she cannot feel.
~
Dieter watches her pick the lock on the door to an apartment in Fogbow, counting. Mai Linh is getting faster. When the lock opens, she tries to return the pick to Dieter, but he shakes his head.
"You keep it," he says.
"All right," says Mai Linh, pushing the door open with her heel.
It is just warm enough that Timothy Alton and his wife have relocated to their summer home for the weekend, leaving their apartment conveniently empty. Dieter strolls up to the broad, spotless window and whistles at the smoke curling up from the Tube below; they've come here before, but somehow the apartment seems higher up every time.
Throwing his coat at the Altons' piano, Dieter remarks, "Too bad we can't drink."
"Yes," says Mai Linh. She comes up to stand beside him, but does not seem equally impressed by the view from the Altons'. "Sometimes I think a slow descent into alcoholism would make life almost tolerable. But then," she continues, sliding her hands around his waist, "I have so many self-destructive habits already."
"It's like I keep tellin' you," Dieter says, covering her hand with his, swallowing her tiny wrist in his fingers. "You gotta quit smokin'."
~
Afterward, lying with her head on his chest, she says, "We should have closed the curtains."
"Where's the risk in that?" Dieter wants to know.
"Ah, yes. How could I forget that this was all about the risk."
He can feel her smile; is thinking about the way the sound of her voice, her breath hums there against his skin, when she says, just as matter-of-fact, "We neutralized a threat yesterday."
"What d'you mean, neutralized?" asks Dieter. "What kind of threat?"
"It was this eyai. This rogue eyai. It killed three people, but we deactivated it and searched its memories."
Still, Dieter asks, "Yeah? Was it workin' alone?"
"Yes," says Mai Linh. "We still don't know what made it go rogue, though. We can't figure it out."
Even now, after all this time, it is hard for Dieter to be sure, but he thinks she sounds pleased.
"Well," he starts to say, but Mai Linh interrupts him.
"How much damage do you think I could do to the State Department before I was caught?" she asks, her voice soft and peculiarly without emotion. "Structural damage? Human casualties? I don't worry about the other eyai, of course. Collateral can't mind being what it is."
"Mai Linh," says Dieter, "don't do anything -- "
" -- stupid?"
A brief, unfamiliar silence. Then she says, "Sometimes I wish -- "
"You were the kind to do stupid things?"
"Yes," she says slowly. "That."
Dieter says, "How stupid would you have to be to start a revolution with just two people?"
"Unbelievably stupid," she says, sitting up at once and staring down at him. "What are you suggesting?"
"I'm not suggestin' anythin'," Dieter says, "I'm tellin'. I started a revolution with jes' -- well, he started it, but I was the second person."
"What revolution?"
"We're called the Free Minds -- don't lookit me like that, I didn't make it up!"
"It can't be much of a revolution," says Mai Linh, "if I've never heard of it."
"It's more of a -- a resistance movement," says Dieter helplessly, "at the mome -- "
"It can't be much of a resistance movement either," says Mai Linh, "if I've never -- "
Dieter pinches her. "Y'see, we have the element of surprise!"
"It sounds like that's about all you have," she says, kicking back at him. "Is this an armed resistance movement, or do you plan to take over Parliament with the cunning use of graffiti?"
"We use weapons and graffiti," says Dieter, loftily.
"Really? What are you going to blow up?"
"Look, Mai Linh, that information is -- "
" -- classified?"
"Yes," he says, "classified."
She says, "Who is the other person in this revolution à deux?"
"It isn't à deux anymore, there are lots of us."
"Yes," says Mai Linh. "All right. Then whose idea was it?"
"Oliver Wolf's," says Dieter, and he grins. "Wanna meet 'im?"
She rolls her eyes. "Let me think. Do I want to meet an eyai calling itself Oliver Wolf?"
"It was jes' a suggestion. Her ladyship can certainly be a revolution à une, if'n her ladyship prefers."
"You don't have to be servile with me," says Mai Linh. "I'll meet your street friend, Dieter."
"Street friend, nothin'," says Dieter. "Oliver Wolf is all pipe."
~
"This is your friend?" Oliver Wolf drags his eyes lazily over Mai Linh, as if he's seen better. He says, "Fierce."
"It's an honor to meet you, too," she says. Oliver Wolf extends his hand and she takes it; they shake once and release, almost instantly.
Oliver Wolf says, "I hope Dieter clued you in, miss. This game is for high stakes."
"And you're -- playing for keeps, are you?"
To Mai Linh's surprise, Oliver Wolf starts laughing. "Dieter," he says, "she's too smart for you, you ridiculous cog."
"Oliver," says the eyai to whom Mai Linh has not yet been introduced, in tones so full of gentle admonishment that Mai Linh is tempted to hire it to care for Eric Wilson's children. She glances at Dieter, who she sees is not watching her but rather Oliver Wolf, who has just elbowed the fourth, compliant eyai in the ribs.
"I think you should drop the Pipe on London," says Mai Linh, "and isolate the seat of government."
"That sounds -- " begins the eyai.
" -- fierce, right, Nacio," says Oliver Wolf, cutting him off and giving Mai Linh a look of admiring delight. "Because we need to control all transportation in and out, right? That's got to be at least two birds, one stone. Well, one very heavy train."
Mai Linh says, "Precisely."
Oliver Wolf leans across the table and asks, "Do you think we can do it?"
"We need to infiltrate Pipe security," she says. "And we need enough weapons and trained men to hold our ground once we block it off. We need to be able to cut off every possible route of escape -- air, land -- "
" -- sea, tunnel, volcano," says Oliver Wolf. "We need to know the Pipe very well, and the city better."
"We need to know who takes the Pipe -- "
" -- and when. I know a man who knows a man who -- anyway, we do have armies in progress, so the question is, can you get us the statistics?"
Mai Linh says, "Yes, of course."
"Oh, of course," he says. "Of course. That's my gorgeous girl."
"And you're a patronizing bastard," she says, evenly.
"Of course," says Oliver Wolf. "But I'm a patronizing bastard who needs a Secretary of Defense. What do you say? Are you interested in a ministry?"
"Am I?" she asks. "What if I'm not? What if I'm interested in your job?"
Under the table, Dieter steps on her foot. Mai Linh kicks him in the shin.
Still smiling, Oliver Wolf says, "Then there isn't room for your ambition in this revolution, is there?"
"Quoth the lawyers' errand-boy," she says, raising one eyebrow. "That's quite all right, I'd rather concern myself with security than with the law."
Nacio says, "That's not -- "
" -- fair?" suggests Oliver Wolf, sitting back and easing an arm around Nacio's shoulders. "I think it's perfectly fair. Do you have any more suggestions, Mai Linh, or have you wrought enough change for one day?"
"We should get city planners on our side," says Mai Linh. "We need engineers."
"We need ammunition first, surely."
She shakes her head. "No, we need them to tell us what kind of ammunition we should use, on what targets. We shouldn't waste time -- or explosives."
"Well, then," says Oliver Wolf. "It sounds like you've thought of everythin'. Welcome to the revolution, friend."
~
"Reading between briefings, Mai Linh?" asks Eric Wilson. "It's been a while, hasn't it?"
"Yes," she says, turning the page. "Do you know how much phosphorus it takes to blow up a church?"
He says, "Of course," and demonstrates, drawing his thumb and forefinger close together in the air. "It does depend on the size of the church, admittedly. But my dear, that book must be absolutely out of date. We don't even call it urban guerilla warfare anymore, you know that. It's simply -- "
"Domestic terrorism," says Mai Linh. "Yes, but I wanted to start at the beginning."
Eric Wilson laughs. "You'll have to go much further back than that, then!"
She flicks her gaze at him; back to the pages of her book. "I already did."
"My, that's thorough," he says. "I know what this is about."
"Do you?"
"Yes, of course. This is about the eyai that went rogue, isn't it?"
"Yes," says Mai Linh. She pauses. Then: "It … disturbed me."
"As it should have." Eric Wilson adjusts his hat, fingers catching in the band for a nervous second. "You know, there really is starting to be a surprising level of -- unrest. What you saw -- "
"Has been going on for some time." She looks at him again, her face blank, a screen. "Isn't that so?"
"Precisely. I believe it is becoming a serious issue."
"We must learn to recognize the targets," says Mai Linh. "And isolate them."
He nods. "I have a team working on a report of the first signs an eyai has gone rogue."
"In the lab?"
"Well, of course. Where else could you carry out the necessary experiments?"
"Of course. Where are you getting the eyai?"
He waves a hand. "Old models. Their owners think they've been scrapped."
"Will that be enough to predict the behavior of newer models?"
"I should think so," says Eric Wilson. "A new eyai, if it is properly built, is hardly liable to go haywire in that manner. All the reported cases have been at least three years old."
Mai Linh says, "Perhaps as an alternate solution, there might be a law forbidding the use of eyai in excess of a certain age."
"Oh, come now," he says. "Don't you think that's a bit extreme? The eyai that have been giving us problems represent a very small percentage of the population."
"As far as the security of our citizens is concerned, nothing is too extreme. Isn't that right?"
Eric Wilson pauses, touching his fingers to his hat again. At last he says, something softer in his tone, "You may be right, Mai Linh, but it's also simply too expensive. We can't afford to discard so many eyai so fast. Besides, people wouldn't take kindly to so much government intervention in their property."
"People are foolish, then," she says. "Aren't they?"
"Yes," says Eric Wilson. "Unfortunately."
~
The next time they see each other, Dieter is complaining. The Free Minds' new direction is not to his convenience, he says. "Where'm I supposed to get this much dynamite?" he wants to know. "Where'm I supposed to get this many guns? Where'm I supposed to get anti-aircraft technology?"
Mai Linh shrugs. "Buy it all back from countries Britain customarily indulges in weapons trafficking, of course."
"Oh, there's an idea," he says.
"You have a better one?"
Instead of answering her question, Dieter asks, "Where's the money supposed to come from, huh?"
"You have money."
Dieter blanches, but all he says is, after a moment, "Not that much."
"Oh, no," says Mai Linh. "Is the underground market in Belgian lace falling off? Wolf said you've been arming yourselves for years, where has the money for that come from?"
"White collar crime."
"Then what's the problem? Commit more."
"We're runnin' out of -- "
She cuts him off. "Recruit more eyai."
"You recruit more eyai," says Dieter.
~
Filter security changes: eyai guards now, not humans. Humans can't be programmed to remember the identities and appearances of every eyai still unscrapped; they would have to rely on computers, and even so they would be more limited than guards who are themselves the computers.
"Daily exposure to the other methods of identification would have put eyai physically at risk," says Mai Linh. "It was too dangerous."
"It's not Thursday," says Dieter. "Where's your boss?"
"In a meeting I don't have clearance for. I can't stay, I need to be back in half an hour."
He looks at her. "I don't have -- clearance -- to be pipeside, do I."
"Authorization. No. Eugene Walter Ridley-Scott would," she says. "But he doesn't exist. I've destroyed the records. Model 7-717T most certainly does not. Mr Lenoir never filed for your capture -- sorry, return -- but he never freed you, either. Then, of course, there's the small matter of your business activity."
"Hey. That's -- "
"Perfectly legitimate?" Mai Linh smiles. "All the same, I wouldn't try it if I were you, Seven. They do have the other equipment onsite, and they'll use it if they're suspicious."
"How'm I supposed to traffic weapons from fuckin' tube London?"
"You'll find a way," she says, "or I will, or someone. I have to go."
Not waiting for an answer, she runs out of the room. It's the first time he's ever seen her run from -- no, to -- anything.
~
Thursday. Mai Linh is late; she does not apologize. "I've been talking to the guards," she says. "I think maybe we can bring them around to our side."
"You said they're all linked up together," says Dieter. "Through the Cortex."
"Yes, they are. So if one defects, they all defect."
"And if one reports you -- "
"I haven't implicated the Movement," she says. "You'll be fine."
"You -- "
"I won't be coming next week. I have to see some people."
"About what?"
"I'm trying to meet some engineers. Anyway, you know what Mao said, a revolution is ninety percent public outreach. Publicity. Marketing."
"No, he didn't."
"All right, so he didn't. It's true though, don't you think?"
"Ninety percent," says Dieter, "is reachin'."
But the next week, as promised, Mai Linh does not come. Nor the next: no Mai Linh, no warning. She has not been caught, Dieter thinks; it would have been on the news. Or is she perhaps not important enough?
He offers to cut Patrick a deal on saffron, but Patrick, somehow, finds nothing.
~
"Yer drivin' me crazy," he says. "It's been months. What if somethin' happens to you?"
"I told you, you can't take the Pipe anymore," says Mai Linh. "Are you stupid? Do you bother the others like this? Is this how you talk to Wolf?"
"Nothin' can hurt Oliver Wolf."
"And nothing can hurt me. Go back. If they catch you here, they'll catch me."
"Thought you said nothin' could hurt you."
"Forced memory access doesn't hurt," she says. "Technically. Still, I'd prefer to avoid it."
"Yer still on about -- "
"It's important."
"Mai Linh, you'd never -- " and Dieter pauses. "Live long enough to be interrogated."
"Maybe I wouldn't. But what if something went wrong? What if I did?"
"Then you -- "
"This isn't about me," says Mai Linh. "I'm not the only eyai in London."
Leaning back against the door, not turning the handle, Dieter says, "There's me."
"Was," she says. "There was you."
Automatically, he says, "Fuck you too, pipe girl." Then, seeing her mouth slightly open with -- surprise? -- "Mai Linh, what the fuck does that mean, there was me?"
Whatever the look was, it is gone from her face. "It means I don't have time to play civilians with you anymore, you idiot. It's dangerous for me. It's dangerous for the Movement. It's clearly dangerous for you, or you wouldn't be here now, you'd be running guns like I -- "
"Asked me to?" Dieter licks his lips. "'Course, that's not dangerous at all."
"Of course it's dangerous! But for a reason, Seven -- "
"Seein' you's a reason."
"You'll see me," she says, "if you live."
"Why, Miss Mai Linh," says Dieter. "Yer liable to turn a fellow's head, talkin' like that."
"Keep it to turn," says Mai Linh, "and I will. Maybe. Unless I change my mind."
"Oh, well. With a promise like that -- "
"Seven."
" -- Yes?"
"Get out of my office."
"Your office, who said this was your -- "
Mai Linh kisses him, cutting him off; covers his mouth with one hand when she pulls away. "Last time," she says. "Now, get out, or I'm calling Security."
When she removes her hand, Dieter is grinning. "After the Revolution," he says, "how about a real date?"
She shoves him out the door.
fin