Read Online Deus X by Norman Spinrad - Free Book Online Page B

neighborhood stockbrokers done up as bulls and bears, humorous loan sharks with giant cartoon teeth, something more sophisticated was required. The programs had to be goal-oriented, semiautonomous,capable of interacting with humans on subtler levels, counterpunchers able to react off more than recorded responses.
    Chaos theory in the software produced rather delphic results, so they turned, to the everlasting delight of the legal profession, to human templates.
    The downloading of consciousness software into electronic-level afterlife was a preexisting technology, but cheap it wasn’t, what with the process itself, the prepayment of a thousand years’ worth of electric power to keep your successor entity up and running, and all those entertainment channel connect charges, and electronic immortality was only available to the well-heeled few.
    So a lot of people were willing to sell duplication rights to subroutines of their successor entities or even edited expert system versions of the whole program.
    If you were famous, your dupe could earn you a handsome royalty as a corporate or government spokesprogram; if you were an expert of a marketable sort, your expert system version could bring home the bacon; and in the end, even Mr. and Ms. No One In Particular could sell off subroutines to durance vile as programs to run things like metro trains, automated highway segments, weather sats, assembly-line modules, for enough to keep their successor entities up and running and plugged into at least a few of the cheaper entertainment channels.
    Why not? It was cheaper than hiring armies of programmers for the buyers and there were no union hassles, and the sellers were assured that their wage-slave doppelgangers had had all self-awareness loops edited out.
    So what lived, or existed, or ran, on the Other Side of Heaven’s Gate were the full successor entities themselves, eternally retired on their royalties, as it were, or software heirs to meatware templates who were rich in the first place, dreaming their entertainment channel dreams, and trying to convince themselves they were real.
    Contract law gives them only two legal rights. As long as the juice charges get paid, they can’t be wiped, and they control their own Big Board environment, namely the Other Side of Heaven’s Gate, access to humans by invitation only.
    All I could do was knock on the door and hope that someone would let me in.
    I had several familiars who, for whatever reasons of their own, would generally come when I called. There was Madame Suzy, whose template had been a professional gossip monger of the upper crust, and whose successor appeared as an aging femme fatale out of some moldy drawingroom movie. There was the Chairman of the Bored, with corporate connections via his expert system spin-offs. There was the Joker, who insisted he had inserted a random number generator in his motivational program to simulate free will, andcould sometimes be persuaded to trash pinkertons for kicks.
    But these were what in olden days my profession had called low-level snitches, and any entity capable of lifting a program from the Vatican’s sealed net would not likely have revealed itself to such solid state riffraff. I needed to conjure something more powerful, a predatory electronic bloodhound with a sensitive nose, whose tentacles extended farther into the vasty deep.
    “Knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door,” I said, initiating the moron access routine.
    “Who’s there?” said the type on the gate display.
    “Marley Philippe.”
    “Identity verified. Proceed to access request.”
    “I want to talk to the Inspector.”
    In the gate appeared a cloaked and hatted figure in black silhouette. Stylized mouth and nose in generic fleshtone outline below mirrorshades doubling your own face. The Inspector walked a few steps forward. “What is it, Philippe?” he said in a smoothly mechanical voice, like a well-oiled serpent.
    The Inspector, he ain’t saying,