Black Glass Read Free Page A

replayed his v-mail as Lisha lay back on the pillows, her whole body a shrug, and rolled to face her own console, tuned it to iVogue.
    He thought: She’s losing her ability to pretend she cares when I stop making love to her. There was a tell-tale smell in the room, lingering on his genitals—a chemical smell he was tempted to complain about. It was her pre-applied vaginal lubricant. She’d put it in right before their session, obviously. It was perfumed but you could smell the lubricant chemicals underneath. Which meant that she couldn’t get excited enough to lubricate naturally. With him, anyway. He toyed with the idea of hiring someone to excite her, some body builder perhaps. But it was insulting, his
having to do that. No: She was going to make an effort. He’d talk to her later. He reached for the towel dispenser, wiped the lubricant off with one hand, his other hand scrolling through messages.
    There was v-mail from Mitwell—a cherubic exec wearing a formal blue-silk choker, his unaltered, plebian face an irritant to Grist.
    Really, Grist felt, this whole business of resisting facial improvements, with nanosurgery so handy for the moneyed, was an obnoxious fad. “Naturalism.” Having to look at faces so natively unattractive was like having to gaze on a man’s scrotum. But Mitwell was “a natural.” Hypocritically, though, he often used a semblant. They all did.
    “When you’re ready, sir,” Mitwell (or his semblant?) was saying. “Just hit ‘two’ for the semblant spot—this one’s for executives’ clubs.”
    Grist tapped the console’s control and Mitwell’s image was replaced by a lovely blond spokesperson, her hair artfully tousled, her tone intimate. “I understand. I do. You’re busy. That’s the point. You’ve heard about semblants—only you haven’t, not really. You only think you have. Seventy percent semblance wasn’t enough for Slakon. The new Slakon semblants copy ... you. Your image, your presentation, your personality ... completely.”
    At Grist’s urging, Slakon had trademarked the word “semblant” two years before. The word “simulation” came off as something fake and even cheap. And they didn’t want cheap—semblants should be about glamour. Success. Money. The term “semblant” was rapidly replacing the older words like “mindclone” and “cyberclone” and all the other distastefully antiquated “clone” derivatives. There was nothing biological about a semblant, after all.
    As Grist watched, the new spot cut to an image of a young male exec looking critically at variants of his own semblant. They looked fuzzy . “Everything you are—” The images then came sharply into focus. The exec looked into the camera and put his finger over his smiling lips: Shhhh! “—you edit for privacy at your discretion.” Two of the semblant images put their fingers over their mouths, with slightly different expressions; the third one simply winked.
    “And now Slakon can ‘semblant’ your mind for up to fifteen meetings at once!”
    The spot showed the exec leaning back in an easy chair, colorful cocktail in one hand, the other hand resting lightly on the thigh of the pretty blond announcer. Wearing elegantly-draped long, filmy blue lingerie, she was now perched with an improbable buoyancy on the arm of his chair. Behind them a multiply-windowed screen showed the exec’s semblants taking digital meetings, screens cheerfully talking to other, endlessly replicating screens ...
    “Take care of business ...”
    “... with Slakon semblants!” the exec chimed in, lifting his glass to the camera.
    Then the final tagline from an authoritative male voice: “They’ll believe ... you really are there!”
    Small disclaimers zipped by at the bottom of the image: Contracts closed by semblants are not legally binding unless Self-Certified.
    There was another version for women execs. Grist reckoned both of them too on-the-nose vulgar for their target audience. And too