Black Glass Read Free Page B

retro.
    Grist hit call back, using his standard business semblant, the digital face matching what he was saying. But the face Mitwell saw was composed, sober, attached to a fully dressed body. No live cam of his nudity for Mitwell. “Mitwell? I hate it! Too in-your-face, too retro. Like something from the last century ... ugh.”
    “I think it was supposed to be campy that way or something.”
    “We don’t do campy. Get something arty, something without all this stiff voiceover business. Get Jerome-X or somebody to do music-vid. I understand he’s finally Sold Corporate. Get on it.”
    Grist clicked off line and drank some more brandy. “You wanta drink, Lisha?”
    “Nah-uh.”
    “You sulking?”
    “Nah-uh.”
    “No?” He had an impulse to please her. Strange, since he should be angry with her using lube to be able to make it with him, but he felt apologetic, in some undefined way. “Wanta take your little round ass shopping?”
    “Yeah!” She suddenly sat up, all perky, playing a happy little girl, beaming.
    Happy little girl; but it was almost his face, and suddenly he was reminded of himself as a little boy.
    Little boy in Los Angeles. Back before they built the dike to protect L.A. from the rising seas. That far back. Visiting his dad at the Jet Propulsion Lab. The tight-assed old son of a bitch already dying of cancer, but refusing to leave his desk until they pushed him out the door. His dad blinking at him from his office chair—hunched there, feet gripping the floor as if he were physically resisting being pushed out for the next guy; an emaciated comma of a man, trying to remember why the boy was there. Not quite saying, “Why are you here?” And the boy not quite saying, “This is part of your visitation, I was supposed to see you at work.” Later at home, overhearing Mom talking on the phone to her sister about losing the child support money when Dad died. Her main concern. Money trumped death. It was a lesson.
    He wanted to be alone, and just get numbdumb. He rolled over, turned up the vapors, and set the cameras on playback.
    Dow Jones/Pacific Industries tickered digitally by, on the ceiling, underneath the images of himself and Lisha hard at it. His previous contract wife had been annoyed when he checked out the trading while he was banging her.
    Without even looking at Lisha, he keyed in an additional ten grand for her card. Sending her shopping. Wanting her gone as quickly as possible. “There you go ...” he murmured.
    Lisha kissed him on the cheek when “transfer approved” appeared on the screen and she hopped out of the bed, psyched for shopping.

    It’s like guarding robots, Pup thought. What’s the point?
    The only true robot here, though, was a single robot security guard, a vertical column on wheels with two extender arms, that rumbled slowly back and forth, scanning IDs, biometrically cross referencing faces, and otherwise having nothing to do in the long low cinderblock room. A cloudy armor-glass ceiling lit the
room with shadowless uniformity. A room of men ministering to machines; the chuffing-squeak of hard metal kissing soft metal; a faint clanking, a whirring, the occasional comment of one guard to another and a pensive absence of other human noises. The machine shaped and programmed license plates with the digital likeness of the owner imaged in, the face of the licensee shifting back and forth between face-on and profile, the LP numbers scrolling slowly by next to the face, over and over. Now and then some legislator grumped about the slower pace of plate manufacture, with human beings operating the machines—the whole thing could have been entirely automated, but the law said the men had to have some kind of physical employment. Make-work, busy work for human hands.
    Those human hands were Candle’s, now, and Garcia’s, expressionlessly pushing plates under the digiprinter, taking them out, while other men sorted plates by region numbers: other UnMinded whose