“Lao is
what
?”
“Lao is the Chao of the Tao. . . .”
“Shit!” Monique snapped, giving him a convulsive yank.
Then she caught herself.
And took a long deep breath.
Enter his image system. Don’t expect him to enter yours.
“Lao is the Chao of the Tao,” she repeated, now trying to ease it out of him with gentle agreement and soft strokes. “Lao is the Chao of the Tao. . . .”
And then she had another little inspiration.
“Is Lao . . . the
model
of the Tao . . . ?”
“Lao models the condition of the Tao . . .” said Davinda.
An actual coherent sentence! Perhaps it was whatever cerebral enhancers Eric was pumping into this greenhouse California atmosphere, but Monique was beginning to believe that she was not only entering into Davinda’s image system, but starting to decode it.
“Lao” was Davinda’s climate model.
The Tao, from her dim knowledge of such Third Force mumbo-jumbo, was the non-material, non-energetic, spiritual force underlying the universe of matter and energy, aka chi, prana, karma, whatever.
Codewise, in this image system, it probably stood for the planetary karma of the Earth.
“Chao” was all-too-unsettlingly obvious, the simple dropping of an “
s
” to make Chaos rhyme with “Lao” and “Tao.”
Davinda’s climate model was the Chaos of the planetary karma?
That appeared to be the message in this madness.
But it didn’t make any sense that Monique could fathom even from within this Third Force image system.
Unless . . .
“Lao models the condition of the Earth’s Tao . . . ?” she suggested, priming Davinda’s pump handle encouragingly. “And the condition of the Earth’s Tao is—”
“Chaos!” Davinda shouted.
“
Condition
Chaos?”
And before Monique could frame the next question, it all came gushing out in a torrent.
“Condition Chaos! Should I have known? How could I? No one suspected, not Braithwaite, not Pereiro, not Manning, not even the great Allison Larabee, how was I to know, yes, it was implicit in the data, but no program was powerful enough, not before Lao, and even the early iterations of Lao couldn’t show it, the hardware wasn’t good
enough, what was I supposed to do then,
tell them
, they would’ve canceled the program, Lao would
never
have been fully implemented, and—”
“Wait, wait, what are you trying—”
“Caused by a century of the climatech mods themselves! Too late to reverse it, the climate of the Earth has become a chaotic system, and Lao proves it, Lao is definitive, no more complete simulation is mathematically possible. Causality breaks down entirely past a ten-year time-frame in
any
iteration!”
Davinda had been making frantically blinking eye contact with her as he gabbled this stuff and the haunted horrified expression on his face was all too human, so this was obviously what was left of the climatologist in there speaking.
But Monique was beyond her technical depth. Implicit in the data? Iterations? Chaotic system? Definitive simulation? Causality breakdown?
This was an image system she just didn’t know enough mathematics to enter. She had to cozen him into translating it into something she could understand. But how?
Well, if there
was
anything human still inside that brain pan, it was male. And if it was male, the very last bit of humanity it was likely to surrender to the void would be its ego, said essence of maleness being directly circuited to the priapic organ she had firmly in hand.
So . . .
“You’re very proud of your climate model, aren’t you, John Sri Davinda,” she said, pumping him gently but more insistently. “You’re very proud of Lao, it’s such a
wonderful
climate model, it’s the
best
there is, it’s—”
“It’s
more
than a climate model!” Davinda proclaimed. “I am the Tao incarnate in software!”
“It’s
what
? You’re
who
?”
Monique moved her hand up behind the very tip of his cock and applied upward pressure, as if to pull him right up out of himself by the handle.
Whether it was the sexual pressure, or her words, or the mix of
vapors, or a synergy of all three, Davinda groaned, and began to babble a less technical brand of gibberish.
“Lao is a one-for-one model of the Tao of the Earth in software. Lao can . . . can steer the geosphere. Lao is pure pattern, the Third Force created by the interfacing of mind and matter. Lao is Gaia made manifest. Lao is . . . the Way.”
“Deus ex machismo . . .” Monique groaned.
When she sought to drag what was left of John Sri Davinda back into the land of the living by the phallic ego, she certainly hadn’t expected him to emerge from the cranial void proclaiming he had become a self-created god.
It was admittedly a pretty good trick by most standards.
But extracting the money to do it from the bottom-line capitalist pragmatists of the Big Blue Machine went it one better!
“Surely you didn’t tell the Big Blue Machine that they were funding the birth of the Gaian Godhead of the bits and bytes . . . ?”
“They had no need to know.”
“You mean
you
had no need for them to know.”
“The software was mathematically definitive. That was verifiable. The partial iterations they ran pleased them very much.”
“Sure, because they came up Condition Venus, didn’t they . . . ? Or you made sure they did. But you needed the human meatware computer to summon up your Lao of the Tao, didn’t you? And they weren’t about to fork over without a guarantee of a human central processing unit, right? So the bastards blackmailed you into it, right?”
“Oh no,” Davinda proclaimed, his eyes glowing with a sickly and unwholesome glory, “I gladly volunteered!”
“You
gladly volunteered
! To burn your brain out?”
“To become Lao! To become the Steersman of the Planetary Tao!”
Monique dropped Davinda’s prick as if it had suddenly turned into a loathsome slug, which, from a certain perspective, as far as she was concerned, it had.
It was almost enough to make her a Third Force believer.
Whenever two forces oppose, the Third Force emerges?
Oppose Davinda’s definitive climate model with Big Blue’s bottom-line need to sell Condition Venus. Oppose phallic ego and capitalist greed.
And
this
is what emerges.
You can’t bullshit a bullshitter?
As even the rawest Bread & Circuses recruit speedily learned, it was easy enough if the bullshittees had a strong enough self-interest in allowing themselves to be bullshitted.
But . . .
But the presence of the pistol in the purse beside her reminded Monique that none of this had answered her operational question.
To . . . kill or not to kill,
that
was the question.
And nothing she had heard thus far had enabled her to evade or resolve it.
“And when they plug your brain back into the computer tomorrow and run . . . the climate model . . . through you?” Monique Calhoun demanded, rather wanly, Eric thought. “What happens then?”
As Eric watched, John Sri Davinda’s blink rate went sky-high, sweat broke out on his face, and, despite the aphrogas, his erection wilted.
“I . . . I . . . I . . . I . . .” he stammered weakly.
And then he abruptly went through yet another eerie transformation. His furious blinking ceased abruptly. He seemed to stop blinking entirely. His stare became fixed. His eyes became as glazed and implacable and inhumanly indifferent as a sleazoid generalissimo’s silvered sunglasses.
And when he spoke again, the voice was firm and flat and devoid of affect, not unlike the default voice of Ignatz behind the interface personality masks.
“I am become Lao,” it said.
Not unlike it at all.
“And that’s what I’m speaking to now, is it?” Monique Calhoun snapped angrily, but with a strangely plaintive catch in her voice. “And what will . . . Lao tell the waiting world about . . . the condition of . . . the Earth’s climatological Tao?”
“Condition Chaos,” said the meatware voice, perfectly emulating a naked software emulation.
Monique Calhoun finally lost it. She threw up her hands in angry frustration. “Fuck Condition Chaos!” she shouted. “I need to know about Condition
Venus
!”
“All iterations converge on Condition Chaos within a ten-year time-frame.”
“Condition
Venus
, damn you!” Monique screamed. “I need to know, I mean I
really
need to know what Lao, what you, whatever, will tell the world about
Condition Venus
. Real or disney? Yes or no?”
“All iterations converge on Condition Chaos within a ten-year time-frame. No other predictive outcome is mathematically possible.”
“That’s a no, isn’t it?” Monique Calhoun said in a tiny voice, and began kneading her purse compulsively like a lost little girl’s security blanket.
The interrogation phase of this operation would seem to have dead-ended in failure. Beneath the obscure mathematics and Third Force crypticism, John Sri Davinda, or Lao, or whatever might be said to inhabit that meatware corpus, would certainly seem to at least be saying that this so-called definitive climate model would
not
verify the impending reality of Condition Venus.
Therefore, according to the contract, Eric must now remove Davinda. He would have to do it with no assurances as to the ultimate planetary consequences, without knowing whether he would be doing the right thing.
That at least would be the fulfillment of a contract he had accepted but others had issued, so he could at least try to persuade himself that the responsibility was collective.
But the responsibility for setting up Monique Calhoun to take the fall for it would be his alone. Because framing Monique for the hit would be a deed done merely to evade his own personal consequences.
And that Eric
knew
would be wrong.
In that moment he could’ve blown John Sri Davinda away just for confronting him with this entirely unwelcome crisis of the conscience he hadn’t known he had. Or wanted to.
“Any bright ideas, Mom?” Eric snapped angrily.
“Use your noodle, kiddo,” Ignatz told him.
“Brilliant!”
But upon a moment’s less than cool reflection, Eric did.
Or rather, in the time-honored human manner, allowed his emotions to run through his brain, and thence through his mouth:
“All right, Voice, eat Whirlwind!” he commanded.
A mighty white vortex came whipping in off the sea at unreal speed, growing larger and larger as it came, blowing the sea into waves, and the waves into breakers, and the breakers into a foam that broke up into pixels, tearing the serene blue Californian sky into shards, ripping away the verdant veneer of the landscape to reveal the bare rock beneath and the pixelation beneath that, rending the very mountains electronic dust to become the world entire.
“The white tornado!” Monique shouted over a rumbling roar not quite loud enough to prevent her from hearing herself. “Condition Venus! It’s the end of the world!”
John Sri Davinda, or that which he had become, sat there in the eye of the storm with as much emotion showing on his face as in the utterly detached voice in which he spoke.
“This is not a white tornado. This is an emulation of a white tornado. This is not Condition Venus. This is an emulation of Condition Venus. This is not the end of the world. This is a modeling of the end of the world.”
“And what are you, you son of a bitch,” Monique shouted at him, “a computer program emulating a human being, or a human being modeling a computer program?”
Davinda’s blank expression did not change. His eyes were turned in Monique’s direction but she did not at all sense that he was looking
at
her. He didn’t answer. A slight increase in his blink rate was the scant and only evidence that there might still be some remnant of a human being in there.
And Monique knew that this was her very last chance to reach it.
“Please, please, please, John, talk to me now,” she begged forthrightly, “because if you don’t . . . if you don’t . . .”
Nothing.
Her hand found her purse and opened it. And slid inside. And found the grip of the flechette pistol.
Nada.
And closed around it.
Rien de tout.
And there in the pitiless heart of the white tornado, Monique began to cry.
Not the Whirlwind, not the tears of the woman crying within it, nothing was going to rescue Eric from the fulfillment of his contract.
He drew the flechette pistol from its shoulder holster, checked the magazine, flipped off the safety, started to rise, then hesitated, caught short by the leaden weight of the second pistol in his jacket pocket.