And the dark blur that flew past Chia then was Masahiko, who pulled the door shut on the Russian, grabbed the knob with both hands and jumped up, jamming one paper-slippered foot against the wall, the other against the door, and hung there. “Run,” he said, his arms and legs straining. Then his hands slipped off the round chrome knob and he landed on his ass.
Chia saw the knob start to turn.
She put the fangs of the stungun against the doorknob and pushed the stud. And kept pushing it. 37. Work E~cperience Laney sat in the van’s front passenger seat again, the ‘phones on his lap, waiting for Arleigh to connect Kuwayama’s gray module, He looked through the windshield at the concrete wall. His side didn’t hurt quite as much now, but the meeting with Kuwayama and the idoru, and then his huddle in the van with Yamazaki, had left him more confused than ever. If Rez and Rei Toei were making decisions in tandem, and if Yamazaki had decided to go along with them, where did that leave him? He couldn’t see that Blackwell was going to wake up to find some innate wonderfulness in the idea of Rez and Rei together. As far as Blackwell was concerned, Rez was still just trying to marry a software agent-whatever that might turn out to mean.
But Laney knew now that the idoru was more complex, more powerful, than any Hollywood synthespian. Particularly if Kuwayama were telling the truth about the videos being her “dreams.” All he knew about artificial intelligence came from work he’d done on a Slitscan episode docLimenting the unhappy personal life of one of the field’s leading researchers, but he knew that true Al was assumed never to have been achieved, and that current attempts to achieve it were supposed to be in directions quite opposite the creation of software that was good at acting like beautiful young women.
If there were going to be genuine Al, the argument ran, it was
most likely to evolve in ways that had least to do with pretending to
be human. Laney remembered screening a lecture in which the Slitscan episode’s subject had suggested that Al might be created accidentally, and that people might not initially recognize it for what it was.
Arleigh opened the door on the driver’s side and got in. Sorry this is taking so long,” she said.
“You weren’t expecting it,” Laney said.
“It isn’t the software, it’s an optical valve. A cable-tip. They use a different gauge, one the French use.” She curled her hands around the top of the wheel and rested her chin on them. “So we’re dealing with these huge volumes of information, no problem, but we don’t have the right cable to pour it through.”
“Can you fix it?”
“Shannon’s got one in his room, Probably on a porno outfit, but he won’t admit it.” She looked at him sideways. “Shannon’s got a friend on the security team. His friend says that Blackwell ‘questioned’ one of the men who tried to grab Rez tonight.”
“That’s who they were after? Rez?”
“Seems like it. They’re Kombinat, and they claim Rez has hijacked something of theirs.”
“Hijacked what?”
“He didn’t know.” She closed her eyes.
“What do you think happened to him, the one Blackwell questioned?”
“I don’t know,” She opened her eyes, straightened up. “But somehow I don’t think we’ll find out.”
“Can he do that? Torture people? Kill them?”
She looked at Laney. “Well,” she said, finally, “he does have a certain advantage, making us think he might. It’s an established fact that he did that in his previous line of work. You know what scares me most about Blackwell?”
‘What?”
“Sometimes I find myself getting used to him.” 248 William Gibson Shannon rapped on the door beside her. Held up a length of cable.
“Ready when you are,” she said to Laney, opening the door and sliding from behind the wheel.
Laney looked through the tinted windshield at the concrete wall and remembered policing the steps outside the Municipal Court in Gainesville with Shaquille and Kenny, two others from the orphanage. Shaquille had gone on to the drug-testing program with Laney, but Kenny had been transferred to another facility, near Denver. Laney had no idea what had become of either of them, but it had been Shaquille who’d pointed out to Laney that when the injection had the real stuff in it, your mouth filled with a taste like corroded metal, aluminum or something. Pl-ceeb-o, Shaquille had said, don’t taste. And it was true. You could tell right away.