“Whoodeeze tinguished gentry?” said Ditz to Chirp.
“Carefuh watwesay, lipsome. Dizde ruthless Eleanor K. Starke and’er lately dildude, Samsamson Harger.”
I did a double take. The couple on the curb had our bodies and wore our evening clothes, but our facial features had been morphed beyond recognition.
Eleanor stepped into the holoscape and examined them closely. “Good. Good job.”
“Thank you,” said her security chief. “If that’s everything—”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “It’s not everything.”
Eleanor arched an eyebrow in my direction.
Those eyebrows were beginning to annoy me. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” I said. “You altered a pointcast feed while it was being transmitted?”
She looked at me as though I were simple. “Why, yes, Sam, I did,” she said.
“Is that even possible? I never heard of that. Is it legal?”
She only looked blankly at me.
“All right then. Forget I said that, but you altered my image along with yours. Did you ever stop to wonder if I want my image fooled with?”
She turned to her security chief. “Thank you.” The security chief dissolved. Eleanor put her arms around my neck and looked me in the eye. “I value our privacy, Sam.”
A WEEK LATER, Eleanor and I were in my Buffalo apartment. Out of the blue she asked me to order a copy of the newly released memoir installment of a certain best-selling author. She said he was a predecessor of mine, a recent lover, who against her wishes had included several paragraphs about their affair in his latest reading. I told Henry to fetch the reading, but Eleanor said no, that it would be better to order it through the houseputer. When I did so, the houseputer froze up. It just stopped working and wouldn’t respond. That had never happened before. My apartment’s comfort support failed. Lights went out, the kitchen quit, and the doors all sprang open. Eleanor giggled. “How many copies of that do you think he’ll be able to sell?” she said.
I was getting the point, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. The last straw came when I discovered that her Cabinet was messing with Henry. I had asked Henry for his bimonthly report on my finances, and he said, Please stand by.
“Is there a problem?”
My processing capabilities are currently overloaded. Please stand by.
Overloaded? My finances were convoluted, but they’d never been that bad. “Henry, what’s going on?”
There was no response for a while, then he said in a tiny voice, Take me to Chicago.
Chicago. My studio. That was where his container was. I left immediately, worried sick. Between outages, Henry was able to assure me that he was essentially sound, but that he was preoccupied in warding off a series of security breaches.
“From where? Henry, tell me who’s doing this to you.”
It’s trying again. No, it’s in. It’s gone. Here it comes again. Please stand by.
Suddenly my mouth began to water, and my saliva tasted like machine oiclass="underline" Henry—or someone—had initiated a terminus purge. I was excreting my interface with Henry. Over the next dozen hours I spat, sweat, pissed, and shit the millions of slave nanoprocessors that resided in the vacuoles of my fat cells and linked me to Henry’s box in Chicago. Until I reached my studio, we were out of contact and I was on my own. Without a belt valet to navigate the labyrinthine Slipstream tube, I undershot Illinois altogether and had to backtrack from Toronto. Chicago cabs still respond to voice command, but as I had no way to transfer credit, I was forced to walk the ten blocks to the Drexler Building.
Once inside my studio, I rushed to the little ceramic container tucked between a cabinet and the wall. “Are you there?” Henry existed as a pleasant voice in my head. He existed as data streams through space and fiber. He existed as an uroboros signal in a Swiss loopvault. But if Henry existed as a physical being at all, it was as the gelatinous paste inside this box. “Henry?”
The box’s ready light blinked on.
“THE BITCH! HOW dare she?”
“Actually, it makes perfect sense.”
“Shut up, Henry.”
Henry was safe as long as he remained a netless stand-alone. He couldn’t even answer the phone for me. He was a prisoner; we were both prisoners in my Chicago studio. Eleanor’s security chief had breached Henry’s shell millions of times, near continuously since the moment I met her at my friend’s reception. Henry’s shell was an off-the-shelf module I had purchased years ago for protection against garden-variety espionage. I had rarely updated it, and it was long obsolete.
“Her Cabinet is a diplomat-class unit,” Henry argued. “What did you expect?”
“I don’t want to hear it, Henry.”
At first the invasion was so subtle and Henry so unskilled that he was unaware of the foreign presence inside his shell. When he became aware, he mounted the standard defense, but Eleanor’s system flowed through its gates like water. So he set about studying each breach, learning and building ever more effective countermeasures. As the attacks escalated to epic proportions, Henry’s self-defense consumed his full attention.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I did, Sam, several times.”
“That’s not true. I don’t remember you telling me once.”
“You have been somewhat distracted lately.”
The question was, how much damage had been done, not to me, but to Henry. I doubted that Eleanor was after my personal records, and there was little in my past anyone could use to harm me. I was an artist, after all, not a judge. But if Eleanor had damaged Henry, that would be the end. I had owned Henry since the days of keyboards and pointing devices. He was the repository of my life’s work and memory. I could not replace him. He did my bookkeeping, sure, and my taxes, appointments, and legal tasks. He monitored my health, my domiciles, my investments, etc., etc. These functions I could replace. It was his personality bud that was irreplaceable. I had been growing it for eighty years. It was a unique design tool that amplified my mind perfectly. I depended on it, on Henry, to read my mind, to engineer the materials I used, and to test my ideas against the tastes of world culture. We worked as a team. I had taught him to play the devil’s advocate. He provided me feedback and insight.
“Eleanor’s Cabinet was interested neither in your records nor in my personality bud. It simply needed to ascertain, on a continuing basis, that I was still Henry and that no one else had corrupted me.”
“Couldn’t it just ask?”
“If I were corrupted, do you think I would tell?”
“Are you corrupted?”
“Of course not.”
I cringed at the thought of installing Henry back into my body not knowing if he were someone’s dirty little spy.
“Henry, you have a complete backup here, right?”
“Yes.”
“One that predates my first encounter with Eleanor?”
“Yes.”
“And its seal is intact?”
“Yes.”
Of course, if Henry was corrupted and told me the seal was intact, how would I know otherwise? I didn’t know seals from sea lions.
“You can use any houseputer,” he said, reading me as he always had, “to verify the seal, and to delete and reset me. It would take a couple of hours, but I suggest you don’t.”
“Oh yeah? Why not?”
“Because we would lose all I’ve learned since we met Eleanor. I was getting good, Sam. Their breaches were taking exponentially longer to achieve.”
“And meanwhile you couldn’t function.”
“So buy me more paste. A lot more paste. We have the money. Think about it. Eleanor’s system is aggressive and dominant. It’s always in crisis mode. But it’s the good guys. If I can learn how to lock it out, I’ll be better prepared to meet the bad guys who’ll soon be trying to get to Eleanor through you.”