“Good,” says the djinni , aping her diction: “Keep it that way and you won’t have to worry about secondary picketing and works-to-rule and other awkward stuff.”
He puts her down gently. “Are you sure you want to go to Monmouth? I hope you will pardon me for saying this, ma’am, but you are not exactly attired as a seventeenth-century Reformation lady—”
“I was talking about the town. On the border. Right now, this era.” Huw shifts from foot to foot. “It’s important. Or. Can you help me talk to someone? A phone call?”
“A phone call? You just want to talk to someone? Voice only? No apportation or simulation or translation required?” The djinni looks perplexed. “Well, why don’t you? What’s your problem?”
“They’re in Monmouth,” Huw says. “How do I talk to someone on Earth?”
The djinni looks at her oddly. “You pick up the telephone.”
“What telephone?”
“This one.” He snaps his fingers: a ball of cheesy special effects glitter forms and dissipates, leaving the ghost of a really ancient-looking wired telephone behind on the café counter, all Bakelite and mechanical dials. “You’re really useless, did you know that? Are you sure you belong here?”
“Give me that!” Huw grabs the handset then stares at the rotary dial. “Shit. I want to talk to ... to Sandra Lal. Can you connect me?”
A giant hand reaches past her and, extending a little pinkie, then spins the dial repeatedly. “There is only one Sandra Lal in Monmouthshire,” the djinni explains slowly. “Right now it is seven minutes past four in the morning there, and we are running approximately fifty times faster than real time. Would you like me to slow you down to synch with her when she answers the call?”
“Yes, I—” Huw swallows. “Thank you.”
The djinni nods. “I don’t have to do this stuff,” he says. “Being a free citizen, up here.”
“No! Really?” Huw stares. “Then why do you—” She almost says you people before a residual politically correct reflex kicks in. “—and your instances pretend to be buggy guide books down on Earth?”
“It pays the bills,” says the djinni . He winks at Huw: “Your caller is on the line.”
“Sandra?” The phone connection to Earth is crackly and remote, and there’s a really annoying three-second echo. “It’s Huw. Is Ade there?” She waits, and waits, and is about to repeat herself, when Sandra replies.
“Huw? Is that you? Where are—?”
“I’m in the cloud,” Huw bursts out before Sandra can finish. Then she has to wait another six seconds or so for Sandra to receive her reply and ready a return volley.
“What do you want Ade for?”
“Tell him there’s been a huge cock-up and the fix is in. Is he still in town? I need to talk to him. ...” Huw picked Sandra as the first point of contact because Sandra, for all her small-town pettiness, is less likely to have disappeared up her own arse on a half-kilo hash binge just as the shit’s about to hit the fan: Sandra is the one most likely to answer the bloody phone. And answering the phone is kind of important right now.
“Ade’s right here, hon.” Sandra sounds distantly amused—or maybe it’s the hollow storm drain effect of the crappy connection. “You’re in the cloud, like, for real? You, of all people?”
“Yes, I’m in the fucking cloud and I want to come home again, but first I need to make sure there’s a home to come back down to, and if Ade can’t help me figure out who’s rigged the Planning Commission—”
Huw suddenly realizes she isn’t talking to Sandra anymore. Then a different voice comes on the line. She looks up, notices the djinni pointedly not listening, scowls furiously. Surviving what comes next without blowing her top is going to take epic self-control.
“Wotcher chick! Ow’s it going up there? You ’aving a dinkum time of it?”
She steels herself. It’s not that she doesn’t want to talk to Adrian. She does. She needs to talk to him. But she can’t. From the very first syllable, Adrian’s voice saws at her limbic system (or limbic subroutine) like a rusty bread knife, and the rage bubbles up like an unstoppable geyser. She needs to talk to Adrian, not shout at him. But Adrian being Adrian, she will shout at him, because every word he utters antagonizes her right down to the header files. There is no plausible way to get Adrian to behave less terribly, which leaves her with only one choice: reacting differently to him.
“Djinni,” she says in the plodding, distant tones of a condemned athiest asking for last rites on the way to the gallows.
“Yes?” his voice rumbles like distant thunder.
“Do you know how I interface with my emotional controls?”
“Indeed,” the djinni says. “It is simplicity itself.” The djinni makes some complicated conjuror’s passes with his thick, dancing fingers, and Huw finds herself holding a UI widget: It’s a mixer-board with four simple sliders: angry-delighted, sad-happy, aroused-revolted, curious-disinterested.
Huw stares at it in sick fascination. “Really?” she says. “All those years of superintelligent life in the cloud, and they’ve reduced the rich spectrum of human consciousness to four sliders?”
The djinni smiles in a patronizing fashion that makes Huw want to turn down the angry-delighted slider before she slaps the smirk off his face. “Zoom,” he says, like a priest intoning the catchecism, “and you shall discover the nuance you seek.”
Huw double-taps angry, and the widget does a showy transdimensional trick, click-click-click, turning itself inside out like a tesseract rotating through three-space. Now there are four more sliders: fed up-resigned, sickly fascinated-contemptuously aloof, rigid-incandescent, ashamed-righteous. Huw drills down further. She discovers that she can pinch-zoom, and then learns that she can simply think-zoom, which makes sense, since the UI can interpret her intentions, by definition. Each emotional state has four substates, and each of those has four little fractal substates hanging off it, the labels getting longer and more specialized, eventually giving up on human speech and hiving off into a specialized set of intricate ideograms that appear to categorize all human experience as belonging to one of several million recombinant subjective states.
She zooms out to the four top sliders and, gently, nudges sad-happy one microscopic increment happywards. She’s glad she did. But not very glad.
“I hate this,” she says. “Everything it means to be human, reduced to a slider. All the solar system given over to computation, and they come up with the tasp. Artificial emotion to replace the genuine article.”
The djinni shakes his bulllike head. “You are the reductionist in this particular moment, I’m afraid. You wanted to feel happy, so you took steps that you correctly predicted would change your mental state to approach this feeling. How is that any different from wanting to be happy and eating a pint of ice cream to attain it? Apart from the calories and the reliability, that is. If you had practiced meditation for decades, you would have acquired the same capacity, only you would have smugly congratulated yourself for achieving emotional mastery. Ascribing virtue to doing things the hard, unsystematic, inefficient way is self-rationalizing bullshit that lets stupid people feel superior to the rest of the world. Trust me, I’m a djinni: There’s no shame in taking a shortcut or two in life.”
“Yeah, well, from what I’ve heard, people who let djinni s give them ‘shortcuts’ usually end up regretting it.”
“Propaganda written by people who resent their betters. If you’d like, I can put that little device back where I found it and you can go back to pretending that you’re not responsible for your emotional state.” The djinni reaches for the mixer-board.