«Hey! Here it is,» Lou says, half whisperin’. «Rollo, come and help me open up this sucker.»
Rollo pushes past me like a semitrailer rig passin’ a kid on a skateboard. My heart is whammin’ so hard now it’s hurtin’ my ears. Moustache is just standin’ there, watchin’ Lou and Rollo tryin’ to open up that steel door. They’re gruntin’ like a couple pro wrasslers. It’s now or never.
I slash out with the blade and rip Moustache’s arm open from elbow to wrist. He grunts and drops the gun and it goes off, boom!, so loud that it echoes all the way down the tunnel.
«Run!» I yell to Jade and the Chairman. «Get the [deleted] outta here!»
The Chairman just freezes there for a second, but Jade shakes his arm and kind of wakes him up. Then the two of them take off down the tunnel, toward the soldiers. I can’t see where the [deleted] gun landed but it don’t matter anyway ’cause Lou and Rollo have spun away from the door and they’re both comin’ right at me. Moustache is holdin’ his arm with his left hand and mumblin’ something I can’t understand.
«You dumb little [deleted]-sucking [deleted],» Lou says. «I’m going to cut off your balls and feed ’em to you one at a time.»
I hear a click and see the glint of a blade in Lou’s hand. I shoulda known he wouldn’t be empty-handed. Rollo is comin’ up right beside Lou. He don’t need a knife or anything else. I’m so scared I don’t know how I didn’t [deleted] myself.
But I’m standin’ between them and Jade and the Chairman.
«Never mind him,» Moustache yells. «Get the Chairman! Quickly, before he makes it to the soldiers!»
Everything happened real fast. Lou tried to get past me and I swiped at him with my blade and then Rollo was all over me. I think I stuck him pretty good, but he just about ripped my arm outta my shoulder and I musta blacked out pretty quick after that. Hurt like a bastard. Then I woke up here.
So I’m a big shot hero, huh? Saved the Chairman from the terrorists. He came here himself this morning to thank me. And now that the TV reporters and their cameras are all gone, you guys are gonna send me away, right?
Naw, I didn’t do anything except set up the gizmo for them. And they made me do that. Okay, so grabbin’ Jade outta the tank was a crime. I figured you mother-[deleted] wasn’t gonna let me go free.
But what’d they do with Jade? I don’t believe that [deleted] [deleted] story the Chairman told me. Jade wouldn’t do that. Go to a—what the [deleted] did he call it? Yeah, that’s it. A rehabilitation center. She wouldn’t leave here on her own. She wouldn’t leave me. They musta forced her, right. The [deleted] Controllers must be scramblin’ her brains right now, right? The [deleted] [deleted] bastards.
Yeah, sure, they’re makin’ a new woman outta her. And they wouldn’t do nuthin to her unless she agreed to it. Sure. Just like she agreed to have her eyes changed. Big Lou said to change ’em and she agreed or she got her [deleted] busted.
You bastards took Jade away and don’t try to tell me different. She wouldn’t leave me. I know she wouldn’t. You took her away, you and that [deleted] gook of a Chairman.
Naw, I don’t care what happens to me. What the [deleted] do I care? I got no life now. I can’t go back to the neighborhood. Sure, you nailed Little Lou and Big Lou and everybody in between. So what? You think that’s the end of it? Whoever’s taken Big Lou’s place will kick my balls in soon’s I show up back on the street again. They know I saved the Chairman. They know I went against Big Lou. They won’t give me no chance to go against them. Not a chance.
Sure, yeah, you’ll take care of me. You’ll scramble my brains and turn me into some [deleted] zombie. I’ll be choppin’ trees out West, huh? Freezin’ my butt in some labor camp. Big [deleted] deal.
I know I got no choice. All I want is to find Jade and take her away with me someplace where we can live decent. Naw, I don’t give a [deleted] what happened to Moustache. Or the dictator back in his country. Makes no difference to me. All I want is Jade. Where is she? What’ve you [deleted] bastards done with her?
Note: Juanita Dominguez (Jade Diamond) graduated from the Aspen Rehabilitation Center and is now a freshman at the University of Colorado, where she is studying law under a grant from the World Council.
Salvatore (Vic) Passalacqua was remanded to the Drexel Hill Remedial School to begin a course of education that would eventually allow him to maximize his natural talent for electronics. He was a troublesome student, despite every effort at counseling and rehabilitation. After seven weeks at the school he escaped. Presumably he made his way back to the neighborhood in Philadelphia where he had come from. His record was erased from the computer files. He is presumed dead.
LOVE CALLS
«Love Calls» originally appeared under a pen name. When I was the Editorial Director of Omni magazine, I would occasionally submit a short story to the fiction editor or the editor of The Best of Omni Science Fiction through my agent, using a pen name so that they would not know who the actual author was. Once I left the magazine, though, I could put my «alter ego» into retirement and go back to writing short fiction under my own name.
Can a computer be truly intelligent? Perhaps. But can even an intelligent computer have the human attributes of empathy and tenderness?
Read on.
Branley Hopkins was one of those unfortunate men who had succeeded too well, far too early in life. A brilliant student, he had immediately gone on to a brilliant career as an investment analyst, correctly predicting the booms in microchip electronics and genetic engineering, correctly avoiding the slumps in automobiles and utilities.
Never a man to undervalue his own advice, he had amassed a considerable fortune for himself by the time he was thirty. He spent the next five years enlarging on his personal wealth while he detached himself, one by one, from the clients who clung to him the way a blind man clings to his cane. Several bankruptcies and more than one suicide could be laid at his door, but Branley was the type who would merely step over the corpses, nimbly, without even looking down to see who they might be.
On his thirty-fifth birthday he retired completely from the business of advising other people and devoted his entire attention to managing his personal fortune. He made a private game of it to see if he could indulge his every whim on naught but the interest that his money accrued, without touching the principal.
To his astonishment, he soon learned that the money accumulated faster than his ability to spend it. He was a man of fastidious personal tastes, lean and ascetic-looking in his neatly-trimmed beard and fashionable but severe wardrobe. There was a limit to how much wine, how many women, and how loud a song he could endure. He was secretly amused, at first, that his vices could not keep up with the geometric virtue of compounded daily interest. But in time his amusement turned to boredom, to ennui, to a dry sardonic disenchantment with the world and the people in it.
By the time he was forty he seldom sallied forth from his penthouse condominium. It took up the entire floor of a posh Manhattan tower and contained every luxury and convenience imaginable. Branley decided to cut off as many of the remaining links to the outside world as possible, to become a hermit, but a regally comfortable hermit. For that, he realized, he needed a computer. But not the ordinary kind of computer. Branley decided to have a personalized computer designed to fit his particular needs, a computer that would allow him to live as he wished to, not far from the madding crowd, but apart from it. He tracked down the best and brightest computer designer in the country, never leaving his apartment to do so, and had the young man dragged from his basement office near the San Andreas Fault to the geologic safety of Manhattan.